SpamSieve is a Macintosh application that filters out unsolicited mass mailings,
commonly known as “spam.” Previously, most people just ignored spam messages or
created simple rules in their e-mail programs to filter them out. In recent
years, the spam problem has gotten worse. Today’s spam is harder to detect, and
there is more of it. Without the assistance of a good spam filter, you’ll waste
valuable time sorting through your inbox manually.

SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering
to Mac e-mail programs. It’s quick and easy to control SpamSieve from within
your mail program, and you can customize how it interacts with the rest of your
message sorting rules.

SpamSieve learns what your spam looks like, so it can block nearly all of it. It
looks at your address book and learns what your good messages look like, so it
won’t confuse them with spam. Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers
adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as it adapts
its filtering to your mail.

SpamSieve doesn’t delete any messages—it only moves them to a different folder
in your e-mail program—so you’ll never lose any mail. By learning from the very
messages that you receive, SpamSieve is able to block nearly all of your junk
mail, without putting your good messages in the spam mailbox. SpamSieve works
with any number of mail accounts, of whatever types are supported by your e-mail
software (e.g. POP, IMAP, Exchange, Hotmail, AOL). You can even use it with
multiple e-mail programs at the same time, for instance if you use one for work
mail and one for personal mail.

SpamSieve uses a variety of methods to identify spam messages, but
by far the the most important is a statistical technique known as
Bayesian analysis. For a more in-depth treatment of this technique
applied to spam, see this article by Paul Graham and the papers it references.
Bayesian spam filtering is highly accurate and adapts to new types of
spam messages “in the field.”

First, you train SpamSieve with examples of your good mail and your
spam. When you receive a new message, SpamSieve looks at how often its
words occur in spam messages vs. good messages. Lots of spammy words
mean that the message is probably spam. However, the presence of words
that are common in your normal e-mail but rare in spam messages can tip
the scale the other way. This “fuzzy” approach allows SpamSieve to
catch nearly every spam message yet produce very few false positives.
(A false positive is a good message mistakenly identified as spam.
Most users consider false positives to be much worse than false
negatives—spam messages that the user has to see.)

Because you train SpamSieve with your own mail, you have full control.
If SpamSieve makes a mistake, you can train it with the message in
question so that in the future it will do better. Further, since
spammers don’t have access to the messages you trained SpamSieve with,
they have no way of knowing how to change their messages to get
through. Whereas other spam filters become less effective as spammers
figure out their rules, SpamSieve becomes more effective over time
because it has a larger corpus of your messages to work from.

Separate from the issue of identifying spam messages is the issue of
how to prevent you from having to deal with them. There are basically
six kinds of anti-spam software for doing this:

Challenge-Response Systems

This software requires people who send you mail to prove that
they are human, and not an automated spam-sending program. After
sending you a message, they get a reply asking them to complete
a task that is easy for humans but hard for computers. Only then
is the message passed on to you. This system is a nuisance for
senders, delays your reception of the mail, and becomes
impractical when sending messages to a group of people. Also,
challenge response systems cannot deal with spoofed senders or
legitimate messages that are sent by programs.

Server-Side Filters

This software runs on mail servers and often filters out spam
before you ever see it. This means that you do not have to download
the spam messages that it catches. However, some spam messages may
still get through, and, unless the filter is perfect, a few
legitimate messages will not. These could be important messages,
and you will never know that you lost them.

Server-Side Taggers

This variant of server-side filters does not delete possible spam
messages before you download them. Instead, you download every
message and configure your e-mail program to move messages that were
tagged by the filter into a separate spam folder. This eliminates
the major disadvantage of server-side filters—lost messages—however
this type of filter is generally not as accurate as the ones below,
because it does not adapt to your own mail.

Client-Side Filters

This software connects to your mail server to delete spam messages
before your e-mail program can download them. This is a clunky
approach: to catch all the spam messages, you have to run the
program right before your regular e-mail program checks for mail.
This is difficult to time properly if you check your mail often, and
even so you may download some messages that weren’t filtered. You
will also download every good message twice. The anti-spam software
may let you see the messages that it filtered out, so that you can
verify that there were no false positives. However, you have to do
this using its interface, not your e-mail program’s (which is
typically nicer). And if there was a false positive you then have to
transfer it into your e-mail program so that you can file and reply
to it.

Client-Side Proxies

This is like a client-side filter except that the proxy downloads
messages once and stores them locally. The e-mail program then
“downloads” the good messages from the proxy. This addresses the
timing and double-download problems of client-side filters, but
interaction with the filter is still awkward because it happens
outside your e-mail program. In addition, you lose some control over
the connections to the mail server and which messages are left on
the server.

Client-Side Integrated

This category includes SpamSieve and Apple Mail’s built-in spam filter.
Suspected spam messages are moved to a separate folder, which you
can quickly scan at your leisure to make sure there are no false
positives. The e-mail program downloads messages directly from the
mail server, thus avoiding the problems of client-side filters and
proxies. You can train the anti-spam software to improve its
accuracy from inside your e-mail program, and accuracy is higher than
with server-side filters because the anti-spam software can learn
from the messages that you receive. You can also control how
the spam filter interacts with your regular mail sorting rules.

Powerful Bayesian spam filtering results in high accuracy and almost no
false positives. It adapts to the mail that you receive to get even
better with time. Some other e-mail programs include Bayesian filters,
but SpamSieve is more accurate.

Integrates with your e-mail program for a superior user
experience. Plus, you get the same great filtering if you ever switch
e-mail programs or use more than one at a time.

SpamSieve works with any mail provider/host. It filters all your mail
accounts. There is no extra charge for additional addresses or devices.

Colors show how spammy each message is, so you can quickly focus on
the borderline ones if you want to check SpamSieve’s work.

Integrates with the macOS Contacts app so that messages from friends
and colleagues are never marked as spam.

Automatically maintains a blocklist so that it can instantly adapt to
spam messages sent from particular addresses, and catch 100% of them.

Automatically maintains a whitelist to guarantee that messages from
particular senders or mailing lists are never marked as spam, without
cluttering your address book with these addresses.

You can customize the whitelist and blocklist, adding sophisticated
rules that match various message headers, or the message body. The
rules can match text in a variety of ways, including using regular
expressions.

Can use the Habeas Safelist, which indicates messages that are
not spam, as well as the “ADV” subject tag indicating that a message
is spam.

Many spammers encode the contents of their messages so that filters
cannot see the incriminating words they contain. SpamSieve can decode and
look inside these messages. Optionally it can mark them all as spam, on
the theory that legitimate senders do not try to obscure their messages.

SpamSieve keeps track of how accurate it is, how many good and spam
messages you receive, and how these numbers change over time.

Turn off new-mail notification in your e-mail program, and let SpamSieve
notify you only when you receive non-spam messages.

Given that e-mail programs such as Apple Mail, Entourage, and Eudora
include their own integrated spam filters, you may be wondering why you
should consider SpamSieve. The answer is simple: SpamSieve’s higher
accuracy will save you time. You’ll spend less time deleting spam
messages from your inbox; in fact, SpamSieve gets rid of spam so
effortlessly that you may even forget that you have it installed. Read
what the press and other
SpamSieve users have to
say about it. Still not convinced? That’s OK. You can try SpamSieve free
for 30 days.

Mailsmith 2.3.1 and later from Stickshift Software. (By applying
this workaround
you can use SpamSieve with Mailsmith 2.1.5.)

Outlook from Microsoft Office
2011 (14.x) and later, including Outlook 2016 (15.x and 16.x) from Office 365
(limitations described in the Setting Up Outlook 2016 section).
Outlook Live and other browser-based mail are not supported, except via
the Mac clients listed here.

Postbox 2.0 and later from Postbox, Inc.
Postbox Express and the (discontinued) Mac App Store version of Postbox
are not compatible.

PowerMail 4.0 and later (6.x recommended) from CTM Development.
PowerMail only supports SpamSieve with POP accounts.

iOS Mail and Web Mail

SpamSieve does not run on iOS, but you can use it together with your Mac to
filter mail on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This is described in the
iPhone Spam Filtering section.

Entourage v.X (2001) and later (Entourage 2004 or 2008
recommended) from Microsoft.

Eudora 5.x or 6.x (in Sponsored or Paid mode) from
Qualcomm. SpamSieve will also work with Eudora 8.0.0b1
(a.k.a. Penelope) if you follow the Thunderbird instructions.
It does not work with Eudora 8.0.0b2 or later.

MailForge 2.0.4 and later from Macsimize
Software (formerly from Infinity Data Systems).

SpamSieve filters all of your mail accounts. There is no extra charge for
additional addresses.

Multiple Mail Programs

You can freely switch between mail programs or even use multiple mail programs
at once. SpamSieve will share its training data and statistics among them.

Unsupported Mac Mail Programs

SpamSieve is not currently compatible with the following mail programs. You can,
however, use Apple Mail in the background to run SpamSieve but use these
programs to read your mail and to train SpamSieve (via the drone setup’s
special training mailboxes).

Canary Mail is not sufficiently extensible for
us to connect it with SpamSieve. We have offered to help the
developers add support for SpamSieve, and they have expressed interest.
Sending them feedback
will help them prioritize this feature.

Mailbox is not sufficiently extensible
for us to connect it with SpamSieve. This is not likely to change because
the product has been discontinued.

MailPlane is not sufficiently extensible
for us to connect it with SpamSieve. Please contact the developers and tell them that
you would like to use SpamSieve with it.

Mail Pilot is not sufficiently extensible
for us to connect it with SpamSieve. We have offered to help the Mail
Pilot developers add support for SpamSieve. Sending them feedback will
help them prioritize this feature.

Newton is not sufficiently extensible
for us to connect it with SpamSieve. Please contact the developers and tell them that you would
like to use SpamSieve with it.

Spark is not sufficiently extensible for
us to connect it with SpamSieve. We have offered to help the Spark
developers add support for SpamSieve, and they have expressed interest.
Sending them feedback will help them
prioritize this feature.

Sparrow is not sufficiently extensible
for us to connect it with SpamSieve. The Sparrow developers were
interested in adding support for SpamSieve, but the product has since
been acquired by Google and seems to no longer be under development.

Thunderbird 3.0 and
later. Due to changes in Thunderbird, it does not look like it will be
possible to create a SpamSieve plug-in for newer versions of Thunderbird.
However, SpamSieve does work with Postbox, which is an enhanced version of
Thunderbird.

Unibox is not sufficiently extensible for
us to connect it with SpamSieve. We have offered to help the Unibox
developers add support for SpamSieve. Sending them feedback will help
them prioritize this feature.

Mail Program Differences

SpamSieve works roughly the same way with each mail program. This section
describes features that are only available in certain mail programs.

These mail programs allow for more accurate filtering because they let SpamSieve
access the entire raw source of each message, including the attachments: Apple
Mail, Airmail, Entourage, GyazMail, MailMate, Mailsmith, Outlook, Outlook
Express.

Custom Rules

These mail programs let you control SpamSieve through a regular rule, so that
you can determine how it interacts with your other rules: Apple Mail, Entourage,
GyazMail, MailMate, Mailsmith, Outlook 2011, PowerMail.

If you have not already done so, go to the SpamSieve Web site and click the Download (Free
Trial) button. (The trial and full version of SpamSieve are the same
file.) After it finishes downloading, double-click the SpamSieve-2.9.30.dmg
file.

Drag the SpamSieve icon onto the Applications folder.

Double-click the Applications folder to open it.

Double-click the SpamSieve icon to launch it.

Eject the SpamSieve-2.9.30 icon.

It is important that SpamSieve be installed directly in the Applications
folder (not in another folder, or in a subfolder), because otherwise your mail
program might not be able to find it.

Next, you must follow the instructions in the Using SpamSieve section in
order to set up your mail program to use SpamSieve.

Normally, SpamSieve will automatically check for updates and detect that
a new version is available. If you had turned that feature off:

Choose Software Update… from the SpamSieve menu. If SpamSieve’s Dock icon is hidden, you can access the Software Update… command via the Message ‣ SpamSieve - Open Window command in Apple Mail or by using the Open Window script.

The username and password for the automatic update are the ones for
logging into your Mac. They’re not related to SpamSieve. If you don’t
know your password, you can resetit or update SpamSieve by following
the “Manual Updating” instructions below.

Replace the old SpamSieve application file with the new one. That is, if
SpamSieve is installed in the Applications folder, drag the new
SpamSieve application icon into the Applications folder and click
Replace when the Finder asks if you want to overwrite the old
version.

Note: If you get an error saying that the file is locked or you do not
have sufficient privileges, drag the old SpamSieve to the trash and
empty it, and then drag the new one into the Applications folder.

Launch SpamSieve and your mail program.

macOS Updates

It’s best to update SpamSieve before updating macOS. To prevent macOS
from updating itself without asking you, go to the App Store section of
System Preferences and make sure that Install macOS updates is unchecked.

Repeated Update Prompts

If SpamSieve keeps telling you that a new version is available, even after
you’ve updated, you may still have the old version somewhere on your Mac. There
should only be one copy of SpamSieve installed, and it should be stored
directly in your Applications folder. If you see a window saying that you
need to update SpamSieve, you can Command-click on the SpamSieve icon in the
Dock. This will reveal the location of the SpamSieve.app file in the Finder
so that you can see where the old version is and delete it (after quitting
SpamSieve).

If your copy of SpamSieve is damaged, you may need to download and install a
fresh copy.

If you are able to launch SpamSieve, you can ask it to reinstall
itself. To do this, follow the Automatic Updating instructions (in
the Updating From a Previous Version section) but hold down the Option
key when you click the Check Now button.

If you’ve uninstalled SpamSieve, you can always get it back by going
to the SpamSieve Web site and clicking the Download button. After
installing it, you can enter your Serial Name and Serial Number
into the Purchase… window to take it out of trial mode. If you can’t
find your serial number, you can look it up online.

If you are considering uninstalling SpamSieve because you’re having trouble
using it or it doesn’t seem to meet your needs, please see this page or
contact us at spamsieve@c-command.com. We’re happy to help get you up and running and
always looking for suggestions for how to improve SpamSieve.

Temporarily Disabling SpamSieve

To temporarily disable SpamSieve, you can just uncheck the SpamSieve rule(s)
that you created in your mail program. This is a quick way to turn it off if you
don’t want your mail to be filtered for a while. For example, it can be helpful
to turn off spam filtering while you are troubleshooting your other mail rules.

To completely uninstall SpamSieve, first quit your mail program and SpamSieve.
(If SpamSieve’s Dock icon is hidden, you can first show it in order to quit
SpamSieve—or restart your Mac, which will automatically quit SpamSieve.) Then
delete the SpamSieve application file in your Applications folder.

Additionally, follow the instructions below that are specific to your mail
program:

If you are using a single Mac, make sure that you’ve deleted the
SpamSieve rule in Mail’s preferences (described in Setting Up Apple
Mail). If you are using multiple Macs and wish to continue using
SpamSieve on one of the others, you wouldn’t want the deletion to
propagate through iCloud, so you should uncheck the rule rather than
deleting it.

See the How can I open the Library folder? section for how to get to
these files. After opening the Library folder, drag the three items
above to the trash. If you do not do this, Mail will report an error saying
that it could not find SpamSieve.

As an example, to remove the first file, open the Library folder. Inside
the Library folder there is a Mail folder. Inside of that is the
Bundles folder. Inside of that is the SpamSieve.mailbundle that you
should drag to the trash.

You can optionally re-enable Apple Mail’s built-in junk mail filter from
the Junk Mail tab of its Preferences window.

Airmail

Uncheck the Use SpamSieve checkbox in the Advanced section of the
preferences (described in Setting Up Airmail).

After uninstalling the SpamSieve plug-in, you can re-enable Eudora’s own junk
mail support. Control-click on Eudora, choose Show Package Contents, and
move the files between the PlugIns and PlugInsDisabled folders.

Eudora 5

Delete the SpamSieveEudoraHelper file and also run the UninstallEudoraHelper program that came with SpamSieve. (To access the uninstaller, choose
Show Other Scripts from the SpamSieve menu.)

Outlook Express

The scripts are located in the ScriptMenuItems folder inside MicrosoftUserData (which is probably in your Documents folder).

Thunderbird

Choose Add-ons (Extensions if you have Thunderbird 1.5) from
Thunderbird’s Tools menu. Select SpamSieve Thunderbird Plug-in in the
list. Click the Uninstall button.

Put the SpamSieve application in your applications folder. This is
described in the Installing SpamSieve section.

Set up your mail program to use SpamSieve to filter your mail. This is
described in sections 3.1 through 3.10 (below) and in the Legacy Mail
Programs section (e.g. for Microsoft Entourage). Find the section below
that corresponds to the mail program that you’re using.

Train SpamSieve with some examples of your spam and good messages,
as described in the Do an Initial Training section. (This step is
optional but highly recommended. You can skip it if you don’t have
any saved spam messages.)

SpamSieve will launch automatically when new mail arrives. It will
examine each incoming message and move the spam messages to a
separate mailbox. In order to keep SpamSieve’s accuracy high, you’ll
need to tell it about any spam messages that you find in your inbox
or good messages that you find in your spam mailbox. This is
described in the Correct All Mistakes section.

You can return to this page at any time by going to SpamSieve’s Help menu
and choosing Setting Up and Using SpamSieve. The Help menu also contains
a PDF version of this manual, which is easier to search and print.

The rest of this manual contains detailed information about how SpamSieve works
and how it can be customized. If you have a question, it’s probably answered
here. However, following the above four steps is all most users will need to do
to effectively use SpamSieve.

In addition to these written instructions, there is a video that
demonstrates how to set up and train SpamSieve with Apple Mail.

Quit Mail. Then double-click the SpamSieve application and choose
Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the SpamSieve menu at the top-left
of the screen. Now launch Mail, and you should see the SpamSieve -
Change Settings, SpamSieve - Train as Good, and SpamSieve - Train
as Spam items in Mail’s Message menu:

Choose Preferences… from the Mail menu and click the
Rules button in the toolbar. Click the Add Rule button.
Change the description to SpamSieve.

Note: The description of the rule must start with SpamSieve, but you
can add additional text after that, if you want, so long as you don’t use
square brackets, which SpamSieve uses those for color rules.

Change the From (or Any Recipient, prior to macOS 10.12) pop-op menu
to say Every Message. (Every Message is near the bottom of the
menu.) Then, next to Move Message, select the Spam mailbox that you
just created. The rule should now look like:

Note: Although the rule looks like it will move every message to the
Spam mailbox, because you have installed SpamSieve’s plug-in, it will
only move the spam messages.

Now click OK to close the rule and save your changes. Mail may ask if
you want to apply the rule; click Don’t Apply. (If you were to click
Apply now, or in the future when editing a rule, that would filter all
of the currently displayed old messages through SpamSieve, and you would be
obliged to correct any mistakes.)

Drag the SpamSieve rule to the top of the list so that SpamSieve
will be able to filter all of your mail. If you ever need to
temporarily disable SpamSieve, e.g. for testing purposes, you can do
so simply by unchecking the rule.

Make sure that the list shows no other rules for processing
spam/junk messages. If you find any, disable them (by unchecking
them) or delete them.

Select any messages in the Junk mailbox and press the Delete key. The
spam messages will move to the Trash mailbox. (If you do not have a
Junk mailbox or you are using macOS 10.9 or later you can skip this
step.)

Note: You may want to empty your trash before deleting the spam messages.
This will prevent them from being mixed with good messages in the trash.

Go to the Junk Mail tab of Apple Mail’s Preferences window. If
there is a Trust junk mail headers in messages option, uncheck it.
Uncheck Enable junk mail filtering. This will disable its junk mail
filter so that it doesn’t interfere with SpamSieve.

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them in
Mail and then choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam from the
Message menu. (There should be spam messages in the Trash
from Step 6, which you can use for the training.) The messages will
be colored in gray and moved to the Spam mailbox.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose SpamSieve - Train as Good from the Message menu.
Even with Mail’s built-in junk mail filter disabled, Mail may show a
Not Junk button at the top of spam messages; you should ignore
this, i.e. always choose SpamSieve - Train as Good rather than
clicking the Not Junk button.

The keyboard shortcuts for these commands are Command-Control-S and
Command-Control-G.

When training multiple batches of messages, you should wait for Mail and
SpamSieve to finish processing one batch before training the next.

Note: If it takes more than a second or for the messages to move after you
train them, please see the Faster Apple Mail Training section.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically and move the spam messages to the
Spam mailbox. Mail may still color some messages brown and show them in the
special Junk mailbox, even though its own junk filter is off; this is
normal. The Junk mailbox holds spam messages caught by server-side junk
filters before they got to your Mac. These messages are not processed by
SpamSieve, so they are not mistakes and should not be trained as spam. It’s also
normal for messages in the Spam mailbox to say that you marked them as junk;
this is is because SpamSieve told Mail that they were junk on your behalf.

It’s fine to have additional rules in Mail for processing your good messages.
Just make sure that they are below the SpamSieve rule.

If you ever need to manually ask SpamSieve to sift through a mix of spam and
good messages, select the messages and choose Apply Rules from the
Message menu. SpamSieve will move the ones that it thinks are spam to the
Spam mailbox.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Mail. The Apple
Mail Customization section explains some more advanced setup options, such as
configuring the “new mail” notification sound.

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select the messages,
Control-click, and choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam from the
contextual menu. (Do not use the Mark as Spam command.)

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select the messages,
Control-click, and choose SpamSieve - Train as Good from the
contextual menu. (Do not use the Mark as Not Spam command.)

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. Messages that it thinks are spam
will be moved to the Junk or Spam folder. Airmail will automatically
launch SpamSieve when there are new messages that need to be filtered or when
you train messages as spam or as good.

Open GyazMail’s Preferences window and click Junk Filter.
Make sure that Enable Junk filtering is checked and that the
pop-up menu says SpamSieve.

By default, GyazMail will color the incoming spam messages brown. If you
want the spam messages to also be put in a separate folder, create a
folder called Spam. Then click on Rules in the Preferences
window and create a new rule as shown:

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select the messages, go to
GyazMail’s Message menu, and choose Junk ‣ Mark as Not Junk.

You can also use the Junk button on the toolbar or the Message ‣
Status ‣ Junk menu command to toggle the junk status of the selected
messages.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Junk ‣ Recheck Junk Status from the Message menu.

Normally, when you mark a message as junk or not junk in GyazMail, the message
stays in the same mailbox. If you would like spam messages to move to the Spam
mailbox and good messages to move to the inbox, you can set up two rules like
this:

Then, instead of using the Junk and Not Junk buttons to train messages,
you can use the Message ‣ Apply Rule ‣ Train as Spam and Message ‣ Apply
Rule ‣ Train as Good menu commands to train and move them at the same time.

If desired, you can set up keyboard shortcuts for training. For example, give
the Train as Spam rule a keyboard shortcut of Command-Control-S, change the
Description of the rule to Train as Spam\@^s.

In MailMate’s Security preferences, make sure that Enable is
checked next to SpamSieve and that Apply to new messages in is
set to Inbox.

The Mark messages as Not Junk if score is below setting does not
affect SpamSieve or its filtering. Rather, if SpamSieve thinks a message
is less spammy than the score that you enter, MailMate will tell the mail
server that it’s not junk, and it will also decide that it’s safe to
display any remote images that the message references. If you would like
to see remote images for all the messages that SpamSieve thinks are good,
you should set this to 50.

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select the messages and click
the Move to Junk button, or choose Message ‣ Junk State ‣
Junk from the menu bar, or move the message to the Junk
mailbox.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select the messages and click
the Not Junk or Move Out of Junk button, or choose Message
‣ Junk State ‣ Not Junk from the menu bar, or move the message out
of the Junk mailbox.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. The SpamSieve Score column
shows how spammy SpamSieve thought each message was, on a scale from 0 to 100
(with 50 and above meaning spam). (The Spam Score column shows the spam
level reported by the server junk filter, if any.)

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Mark as Spam from Mailsmith’s Message menu.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Mark as Non-Spam from Mailsmith’s Message menu.

If you ever need to manually ask it to sift through a mix of spam and good
messages, choose Recalculate Spam Score from the Message menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Mailsmith. The
Mailsmith Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.
For more information about using SpamSieve with Mailsmith, please see
Chapter 8 of the Mailsmith User Manual.

These instructions apply to Outlook 2011 (14.x), from Microsoft Office 2011. If
you are using Outlook 2016 (15.x and 16.x) from Office 365, please see the
Setting Up Outlook 2016 section. If you’re using the initial release of
Office 2011, please see the Setting Up Outlook 14.0 section. If you are using
Microsoft Entourage, please see the Setting Up Entourage section.

Switch to SpamSieve by clicking on its icon in the Dock. Go to the
SpamSieve menu and choose Preferences…. Make sure that Use
Entourage/Outlook address book is checked and click the Load
button, then the Outlook button.

Choose Install Outlook Scripts from the SpamSieve menu. After you
quit and re-launch Outlook, you should see four SpamSieve items in
Outlook’s Scripts menu:

Choose Rules… from Outlook’s Tools menu. Click on the source list
item under On My Computer corresponding to the type of account you
that have (e.g. POP, IMAP, or Exchange). Ignore the Exchange Server
section of the window, if any.

If you have more than one kind of account, you will need to repeat Steps
4–6 for each account type.

If you had previously used SpamSieve with Microsoft Entourage,
delete any SpamSieve rules that Outlook brought over from your
Entourage setup.

Click the + button. Change the name of the rule to
SpamSieve - Set Category.

For a POP account:

Under When a new message arrives it should say All
Messages.

For an IMAP or Exchange account:

Under When a new message arrives it should say Folder Is
INBOX (<Account Name>).

When you create a new IMAP rule, the pop-up menu at the left will
automatically say Folder; when you create new Exchange rule,
the pop-up menu will say From and you will have to change it
to Folder.

Next, you need to choose the inbox from the pop-up menu at the
right. You may have to choose Choose Folder… and type “in” to
be able to select the inbox.

Click the + button to add an additional rule condition for
each IMAP/Exchange account that you have. Change the pop-up menus
to say Folder Is INBOX (<Account Name>) as before.

Click on If all conditions are met and change it to If any
conditions are met.

Under Do the following, click on the - button to the
right of Change status and Not Junk E-mail to delete the
Change status action.

Click on the pop-up menu that says Set Category and select
Run AppleScript.

Then click the Script… button and Select the SpamSieve-SetCategory.scpt file. This file is stored in the OutlookScriptMenuItems folder (which is probably inside the MicrosoftUserData
folder inside your Documents folder):

Make sure that Do not apply other rules… is unchecked. For a
POP account, the rule should now look like this:

For an IMAP or Exchange account, the rule should now look like this:

Click OK to close the sheet.

Drag the SpamSieve - Set Category rule to the top of the list.

In the Rules window, as before, repeat the following steps for each
type of account that you have (e.g. POP, IMAP, or Exchange) under “On My
Computer”.

Click the + button. Change the name of the rule to
SpamSieve - Move Messages.

Under When a new message arrives, click on the pop-up menu
and change it to say Category. Click on the pop-up menu for
None and change it to Junk. The condition should now say
Category Is Junk.

Click the + button to the right of Junk to make a new
condition.

Click on From for the new condition and change it
to say Category. Click on the pop-up menu for None and
change it to Uncertain Junk. The condition should now say
Category Is Uncertain Junk.

Click on If all conditions are met and change it to If any
conditions are met.

Under Do the following, click on the - button to the
right of Not Junk E-mail to delete the Change status
action.

Click on the pop-up menu that says Set Category and select
Move Message.

Change the menu at the right from None to Junk E-mail. You may
have to choose Choose Folder… and type “Junk” to be able to select
the Junk E-mail folder. The rule should now look like:

Click OK to close the sheet.

Drag the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule so that it is just
below the SpamSieve - Set Category rule(s) (and above your
other rules).

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and
then choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam from Outlook’s Scripts
menu.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose SpamSieve - Train as Good from Outlook’s Scripts
menu.

The keyboard shortcuts for these commands are Command-Control-S and
Command-Control-G.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose SpamSieve - Set Category from Outlook’s script menu. Then choose
Rules ‣ Apply All from the Message menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Outlook. The
Outlook Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.

Go to Outlook’s Tools menu and select Rules. Uncheck or delete
any rules for filtering out junk/spam e-mails.

In the Finder, choose Utilities from the Go menu and open the
Script Editor (or AppleScript Editor) application. Open its
Preferences window. Click on the General tab, and make sure that
Show Script menu in menu bar is checked.

Switch to SpamSieve by clicking on its icon in the Dock. Go to the
SpamSieve menu and choose Preferences…. Make sure that Use
Entourage/Outlook address book is checked and click the Load
button, then the Outlook button.

Choose Install Outlook Scripts from the SpamSieve menu. When in
Outlook, you should now see five SpamSieve items in Scripts menu at
the top-right of your screen:

Note: Unlike previous versions, Outlook 2016 does not have its own
Scripts menu, so these instructions have you use the system one.
Unfortunately, the system Scripts menu does not support keyboard
shortcuts. If you would like to have keyboard shortcuts for SpamSieve’s
training commands, see “FastScripts Keyboard Shortcuts” below.

Open the Outlook-FilterMailboxes.dmg file and drag the
Outlook-FilterMailboxes.app file to your Applications
folder. If it asks whether you want to replace an existing item,
click Replace to replace the old version with the new version.

Drag the Outlook-FilterMailboxes.dmg file to the trash.

Double-click the Outlook-FilterMailboxes.app file in your
Applications folder. You will need to launch this application
whenever you want SpamSieve to monitor Outlook for new messages that
need to be filtered.

You can optionally set up Outlook-FilterMailboxes.app as a
Login Item in the Users & Groups section of System
Preferences if you want it to launch automatically.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically every five minutes. You can make
it check immediately by clicking on the Outlook - Filter Mailboxes icon in
the Dock. Any spam messages will be moved to the Junk folder. If you ever
need to manually ask SpamSieve to sift through a mix of spam and good messages,
select the messages and choose SpamSieve - Move If Spam from the Scripts
menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Outlook. The
Outlook Customization section explains some more advanced setup options. If
the filtering doesn’t seem to be working properly, you can check the setup as
described in the Checking the Outlook 2016 Setup section.

Advanced Setup for Large Inboxes

As set up above, Outlook - Filter Mailboxes looks for spam messages among
the unread messages in the inbox. It moves spam messages to the Junk folder
and leaves good messages in the inbox (marked with the Good category).

If you have lots of messages in your inbox, it can take a long time for Outlook
to check for new messages there, and it may become unresponsive during the
check. One way to work around this is to move older messages out of your inbox,
e.g. to a separate folder such as Archive. Another way is to use the
advanced setup described here, so that SpamSieve looks for new messages in the
InboxSpamSieve folder (which is kept empty) instead of in your actual inbox:

For each account, create a new folder called InboxSpamSieve in the
account.

For each account, create a rule in Outlook that says if Folder Is INBOX
(AccountName) then do Move Message InboxSpamSieve (AccountName):

This will move all new messages to the InboxSpamSieve folder. Outlook
- Filter Mailboxes will scan this folder instead of your regular inbox.
Any good messages will be moved to the regular inbox. Any spam messages will
be moved to the Junk folder. Because no old messages collect in the
InboxSpamSieve folder, processing it will always be fast.

The script page describes
some additional advanced features such as checking for new messages more
frequently and enabling debug logging.

Finding the Junk Folder

SpamSieve moves both automatically filtered spam messages and trained spam
messages to the standard junk mail folders in Outlook. Prior to Outlook 15.36,
Outlook had a single top-level folder called Junk E-mail, with per-account
folders inside. In Outlook 15.36, there is a separate Junk folder within the
section for each account. For more information, please see this thread.

FastScripts Keyboard Shortcuts

If you would like training keyboard shortcuts, as described in Step 5, you can
set up the standard SpamSieve keyboard shortcuts as follows:

Download and install FastScripts. (It is free for up to 10
keyboard shortcuts.)

Launch FastScripts.

From the FastScripts icon menu, go to the FastScripts submenu and
choose Preferences….

Click on the Script Shortcuts tab.

In the Microsoft Outlook section, double-click on (none) in the
Shortcut column next to SpamSieve - Train as Good. It will enter
edit mode. Type Command-Control-G to set the shortcut.

In the Microsoft Outlook section, double-click on (none) in the
Shortcut column next to SpamSieve - Train as Spam. It will enter
edit mode. Type Command-Control-S to set the shortcut.

If you have Postbox 2.5 or later, click on the action (gear) menu in
the upper-right corner of the window and choose Install Add-on
From File…. If you have Postbox 2.0, click the Install… button
in the window that just opened.

Click on the Desktop button, select the
SpamSieveForPostbox.xpi file, and click Open.

Click the Install Now button.

Quit Postbox and re-launch it. If you now go to the Tools menu
and choose Add-ons you should see the SpamSieve Postbox
Plug-In listed there. Next to it will be the version of the
plug-in. The current plug-in version is always listed at the bottom
of SpamSieve’s about box. You can now delete the
SpamSieveForPostbox.xpi file from your desktop.

Choose Preferences… from the Postbox menu and click on
Accounts. For each of your accounts in the list at the left
(plus On My Mac), click on Junk Settings and make sure
that:

Enable adaptive junk mail controls for this account
is checked.

Move new junk messages to is checked.

Trust junk mail headers set by is unchecked.

It is generally a good idea to uncheck the items under “Do not mark mail as
junk if the sender is in” since these can prevent SpamSieve from filtering
out certain spam messages.

Choose Preferences… from the Postbox menu and click on
Privacy. Make sure that When I mark messages as junk is
checked.

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ As Junk, click the bullet in the junk
status column of the message list, or press the J key.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ As Not Junk, click the junk icon in the
junk status column of the message list, or press the J key.

You can also customize the toolbar to add a Junk/Not Junk button.

Note: If Postbox already thinks that a message is junk, it may not let you
mark it as junk—and likewise for not junk. That’s OK; it is enough to train
SpamSieve by marking the messages that are misclassified in Postbox.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ Run Junk Mail Controls.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Postbox. The
Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Mark as Spam from the Mail menu.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Mark as Good from the Mail menu.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Perform Filter ‣ Perform All Filters from the Mail menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with PowerMail. The
Customization section explains some more advanced setup options. For more
information about how to configure PowerMail’s handling of spam messages, please
see the PowerMail documentation.

SpamSieve works with Web mail accounts, provided that they allow access via POP,
IMAP, or Exchange. This includes Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook.com, and
most other Web mail providers. Just configure Apple Mail to access your account
and then follow the normal SpamSieve setup instructions in the Setting Up Apple
Mail section. SpamSieve will then filter your Web mail when Apple Mail is
running.

You can train SpamSieve from within Apple Mail. If you use the drone setup,
you can also train SpamSieve from your Web browser by moving messages into the
special training mailboxes.

Gmail has some special mailboxes that most users do not want to appear in Apple
Mail. This is because these mailboxes contain duplicate copies of messages that
are already in your other mailboxes. Additionally, the contents of these
mailboxes are not filtered by SpamSieve or other Mail rules. When using Gmail,
it is recommended that you hide these mailboxes from IMAP:

In Gmail, click on the gear menu at the top right and select
Settings.

SpamSieve does not have distinct “training” and “working” modes. As soon as you
install it, it is always learning from the messages it sees and always filtering
out the spam that it finds.

Although you can start using SpamSieve immediately and just correct any
mistakes that it makes, it will do a better job of filtering if you use some
of your old mail to do an initial training. This simply means that you give it
some examples of messages you consider to be spam, and ones which you do not.
You do this by selecting some messages in your mail program and choosing a
training command from the menu (as described in the last step of the “Setting
Up” section for your mail program). SpamSieve collects information from the
messages it’s trained with into its corpus, which it uses to predict whether
subsequent messages are spam. Don’t worry; it learns quickly!

How many messages you should train SpamSieve with depends on how many old
messages you have and on how much time you want to put into the process. 195
spam messages and 105 representative good ones are enough for most people to get
very good accuracy, but it’s OK if you don’t have that many. The important
points are:

Do not use more than 1,000 messages.

Using up to 1,000 recent messages in the initial training lets
SpamSieve start out with a high level of accuracy. In general, the
more messages you train SpamSieve with, the better its accuracy will
be. However, using more than 1,000 messages initially, would “fill
up” SpamSieve’s corpus with older messages, making it slower and
less effective at adapting to new kinds of spam that you’ll receive
in the future.

The messages should be approximately 65% spam.

For example, use 650 spams and 350 good messages or 65 spams and 35 good
messages. It is better to use fewer messages in the initial training (i.e.
not use all your saved mail) than to deviate from the recommended
percentage. For example, if you have 500 good messages but only 195 saved
spam messages, don’t train SpamSieve with all 695 messages. Instead, train
it with the 195 spams and about 105 representative good messages.

In order to monitor your progress, you can go to SpamSieve’s Filter menu and
choose Show Statistics. The Corpus section in the middle of the
Statistics window shows how many good and spam messages SpamSieve has been
trained with, and what percentage of them are spam. After the initial training,
SpamSieve will automatically train itself, and you’ll only need to train it
to correct mistakes.

After the initial training, you don’t have to worry about the number or
percentage of messages in the corpus. SpamSieve will automatically learn from
new messages as they arrive and keep its corpus properly balanced.

Accuracy will improve with time, but if you’ve used at least 100 or so messages
in the initial training, SpamSieve should immediately start moving some of the
incoming spam messages to your spam folder. If you don’t see results right away,
check the setup in your mail program. After a few hundred messages of each
type are in the corpus, SpamSieve should be catching most of your spam.

Now you’re done setting up SpamSieve. The Correct All Mistakes section
explains how you can keep SpamSieve’s accuracy high by telling it if it puts any
messages in the wrong mailbox.

SpamSieve examines each incoming message and moves the spam messages into a
separate spam mailbox. It leaves the good messages alone, so they will stay in
the inbox or be processed by your other mail rules. In order to keep SpamSieve’s
accuracy high, you’ll need to correct any mistakes that it makes:

If you find a spam message that’s not in the spam mailbox, train it as
spam.

If you find a good message in the spam mailbox, train it as good.

Normally, the Train SpamSieve whitelist and Train SpamSieve blocklist
preferences are enabled. This means that training a single message as good will
make SpamSieve classify all future messages from that message’s sender as good.
Likewise, training a message as spam will make SpamSieve classify all future
messages from that message’s sender as spam. Normally, the Train Bayesian
classifier preference is also enabled, which will let SpamSieve learn from the
message’s contents so that it can recognize future messages that are similar
even if the sender is different.

How to Correct Mistakes

To correct a mistake, train SpamSieve using the menu commands recommended at the
end of the “Setting Up” section of the manual for your mail program. For
example, with Apple Mail you would select the message and choose SpamSieve -
Train as Good or SpamSieve - Train as Spam from Mail’s Message menu.
Always train SpamSieve using the menu commands. Do not move the messages into or
out of the spam mailbox yourself, as this will bypass SpamSieve.

Correcting All the Mistakes

You must correct all of SpamSieve’s mistakes or its accuracy will deteriorate
over time. The reason for this is that SpamSieve assumes that it classified a
message correctly unless you tell it otherwise, and it will learn based on that
assumption (unless you turn off the Auto-train with incoming mail
preference). Also, the sooner you correct SpamSieve, the better. By promptly
correcting SpamSieve, you ensure that it’s always acting based on accurate
information.

Which Messages to Train

After the initial training, it is not necessary (or recommended) to train
SpamSieve with messages that are not mistakes.

Do train all the spam messages that get through to your inbox. Do this
even for phishing messages, image spams, and messages from forged senders
that you might think would confuse SpamSieve. It’s best to tell
SpamSieve the truth.
Don’t delete spam messages from your iPhone’s inbox because that would
prevent you from training them as spam on the Mac.

Do not train messages that SpamSieve automatically put in the spam
mailbox. Regardless of which color of spamminess it assigned them,
SpamSieve already thinks that they are spam.

Do not train messages that a server filter automatically caught in
the Junk mailbox or Bulk Mail mailbox.

Do not train as spam messages that are merely unwanted, i.e. messages
from:

Legitimate mailing lists that you no longer wish to read.

Companies that you have done business with.

People that you know who send or forward annoying messages.

These messages are not spam, so training them as such could confuse
SpamSieve. For mailing lists, there should be instructions at the bottom of
the e-mail to unsubscribe. Social media sites have ways that you can
configure which types of messages they send you. For other types of unwanted
messages, see you can optionally create a rule in your mail program above
the SpamSieve rule to move or delete them before SpamSieve sees them.

Do not train quarantine digests from a server spam filter. These
messages are not spam, but they contain lots of spammy words. It’s best
to either turn off the server spam filter or to create a rule in your
mail program above the SpamSieve rule to move these messages to another
mailbox before SpamSieve sees them.

Do not delete unwanted whitelist or blocklist rules that
SpamSieve auto-created. Instead, let SpamSieve automatically disable the
matching rules when you train messages as spam or as good.

Undoing a Training

If you make a mistake and tell SpamSieve that a message is spam when it is
actually good (or vice-versa), simply correct yourself as you would correct
SpamSieve. That is, if the message is good, train it as good; if it is spam,
train it as spam. SpamSieve will “undo” the previous, incorrect, training.

Disable Other Spam Filters and Rules

When using SpamSieve, turn off any other spam filters that you’ve installed on
your Mac. Disable any manual rules that you’ve created that move messages to the
Spam mailbox or trash. This will make it clear which messages SpamSieve did
and didn’t catch, which is necessary for you to be able to properly correct it.
If you really need those manual rules, you can recreate them using SpamSieve’s
blocklist or put the rules above SpamSieve’s rule(s) so that the messages are
moved or deleted before SpamSieve sees them.

Using SpamSieve With Multiple Macs

Please see the SpamSieve and Multiple Macs section for information about how
to ensure that you are properly correcting mistakes when multiple copies of
SpamSieve are filtering the same mail account.

Resetting SpamSieve

Not correcting all the mistakes will cause SpamSieve to learn incorrect
information, which will reduce the filtering accuracy. The only way to fix this
is to reset all of SpamSieve’s training:

If you are accessing the same IMAP or Exchange mail account from multiple Macs
running SpamSieve, it can be difficult to know which copy of SpamSieve needs to
be trained to correct a mistake. There are several ways to deal with this
(in order of preference):

Run SpamSieve on a single Mac and let it clean your inbox for all the
Macs. All the training is done from that Mac. This is the simplest
solution. It works well when the Mac with SpamSieve will be running most
of the time, and when you can easily access that Mac to do the training.

Run SpamSieve on a single Mac using the drone setup. This setup works
well when the Mac with SpamSieve will be running most of the time. When
you’re away from that Mac, you can remotely train SpamSieve from any Mac,
iOS device, or even via Web mail.

Run SpamSieve on all the Macs and uncheck the Auto-train with incoming
mail preference (on all the Macs). You can train whichever Mac you
happen to be using at the moment. This will have lower filtering accuracy
than (1) or (2) but is useful in situations when you do not have a single
Mac that is always available for mail filtering. With auto-training off,
you may find it especially helpful to enable whitelisting of previous
recipients.

Run SpamSieve on all the Macs, being careful to only let one copy of
SpamSieve run at a time, and to always correct all the mistakes before
switching to another Mac. This will give better filtering accuracy than (3)
but is a lot more work.

Server Spam Mailbox

With the normal setup, spam messages are stored locally, so they are only
accessible on one Mac. If you are using multiple Macs, you can instead store
the spam on the server so that the same spam mailbox is visible on all the
Macs.

Training Data

When upgrading to a new Mac or using setup (3) or (4) above, you can copy
SpamSieve’s training data from one Mac to another. This is only recommended
if the two Macs will be filtering the same mail account. Macs filtering
different people’s mail should be trained separately for the best filtering
accuracy.

Do not copy SpamSieve’s files using a file synchronization program or cloud
syncing utility such as Dropbox while the SpamSieve application is running.
Doing so can corrupt the files.

License Info

An individual user running SpamSieve on multiple personal Macs generally only
needs to purchase one SpamSieve license. The Purchase… section of the manual
has more information about the license policy.

iCloud Rule Syncing

Multiple Macs using the same iCloud account will automatically have the same
rules in Apple Mail. If you want to use the SpamSieve rule on one Mac but not
the other, you should uncheck it on the Mac where you want it to be disabled. Do
not delete the rule because that would (through syncing) delete it from the
other Mac as well.

POP Accounts

If you are accessing the same POP mail account from multiple Macs, you can
safely run SpamSieve on all of the Macs simultaneously. Each Mac is entirely
separate from the others, so you don’t have to worry about any of the training
issues that IMAP and Exchange accounts have. The downside is that it’s more work
to train each copy of SpamSieve separately.

Due to limitations of the iOS platform, there is not currently an iPhone version
of SpamSieve. However, you can use SpamSieve on your Mac to keep the spam off
your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The Mac has much more bandwidth and processing
power, so it makes sense to do the spam filtering there, anyway. When you check
for mail on your iPhone, you won’t waste time or battery power downloading or
processing spam messages.

Use IMAP or Exchange to Synchronize Your Mailboxes

To use SpamSieve with your iPhone, you’ll need to set both the Mac and the
iPhone to connect to your mail server using either the IMAP or Exchange mail protocol:

Many popular mail hosts—such as Apple’s iCloud, Gmail, and Yahoo
automatically uses IMAP.

Most other modern mail hosts also offer IMAP support.

Some hosts, such as Comcast, can enable IMAP support if you request it.

Some mail hosts only offer support for the older POP protocol. This
makes it impossible for your Mac to clean the spam off your iPhone. We
recommend switching to another provider.

When using IMAP or Exchange, all computers and mobile devices that connect to
the same mail account will share the same mailboxes. The contents of the
mailboxes will be synchronized automatically. The syncing happens when you open
the Mail application, not when you connect the Mac and iPhone and sync in iTunes.

Filtering Out the Spam

You don’t have to do anything extra for SpamSieve to filter the spam on your
iPhone. SpamSieve is already removing the spam from your Mac’s inbox, so the
normal IMAP/Exchange synchronization will automatically remove the spam messages
from the iPhone’s inbox as well.

When your mail program is running on your Mac, it will periodically check for
new mail. (See also the Filtering Spam During Power Nap section.) New
messages will arrive in the inbox, and SpamSieve will move the spam messages to
the spam mailbox. When the iPhone checks for new mail, the spam messages will
generally already have been moved out of the inbox.

If the iPhone happens to see a new spam message before the Mac does:

The message will appear in the inbox for a short while. When the Mac sees
it, it will move it to the spam mailbox and it will disappear from the
inbox on the iPhone.

The iPhone supports push e-mail, which lets it see new messages
instantly. If you receive a lot of spam, you may prefer to turn off the
push feature. That will give the Mac a chance to filter the messages
before you see them on the iPhone. You may also want to adjust your
iPhone’s notifications settings so that it doesn’t show
banners or play sounds when new e-mails arrive.

If you mark a message as read on the iPhone before the Mac sees it, the
Mac will not apply its rules (such as SpamSieve) to the message.

Checking the Spam Mailbox

With the standard setup, SpamSieve puts the spam that it catches in the Spam
mailbox on your Mac. The spam messages are removed from the server and stored
locally on the Mac. This is faster, and it means that the spam messages won’t
count towards your server quota. However, this also makes it impossible to view
the spam messages when you are away from your Mac.

Some users prefer to store the Spam mailbox on the server. This way, if
SpamSieve accidentally puts a good message in the Spam mailbox, you can
access the message on the iPhone when away from the Mac. To do this, see
the Using a Spam Mailbox on the Server section.

Training SpamSieve to Correct Mistakes

With the standard setup, you train SpamSieve directly from your Mac. If a spam
message gets through to your inbox, you should not delete it from the iPhone
because that would prevent you from correcting the mistake.

The Setting Up a Spam Filtering Drone section describes how to set up Apple
Mail for remote training. If you’ll be away from your Mac for long periods of
time, you can then train SpamSieve directly from the iPhone. Correcting mistakes
promptly will keep SpamSieve running at peak accuracy.

Troubleshooting iPhone Spam Filtering

If there are spam messages in the inbox on your iPhone:

If the Mac hasn’t yet downloaded the spam messages at all, you may need to
adjust the Check for new messages preference in
Mail. Make sure that the IDLE command is enabled in Mail’s preferences
for your account. With some servers, it may help
to check for new messages every minute rather than Automatically.

If the spam messages are in the iPhone’s inbox but in the Mac’s Spam
mailbox, try using “pull-to-refresh” to get the iPhone to resynchronize
with the server. It should then update its inbox and remove the spam
messages from the inbox.

If the spam messages are still in the iPhone’s inbox, try logging into
your mail account via Web mail.

If everything looks good in Web mail, there is likely a problem with
your iPhone’s connection to the mail server.

If the spam is in the Web mail inbox but not the Mac’s, there is
likely a problem with the mail program on your Mac.

This section discusses how to change your Apple Mail setup from POP to IMAP so
that you can use SpamSieve for iPhone Spam Filtering. A similar setup will
also work with other mail programs.

Choose Preferences… from the Mail menu and click on Accounts.
Your account(s) will be listed at the left of the window. If it already
says IMAP or iCloud under your account, there’s nothing more that
you need to do.

If it says POP, you will need to disable the POP account and create a
new IMAP one. Click on the POP account and make note of the contents of
the Server Settings (if present) and Account Information tabs.
Then click the Remove now button to remove from the server any
messages that you’ve already downloaded.

Click the + button at the bottom of the window and follow the steps
to create a new account. Choose IMAP for the account type. For the
server and login, enter the information that you noted for the POP
account. (Note: Some providers use a different incoming mail server
name for IMAP.) Put “IMAP” at the end of the account’s description so
that you can tell this account apart from the old one.

You should now be able to check for mail, and Mail will be using IMAP
instead of POP. There will be two sets of mailboxes (Inbox, Sent,
etc.) in the main window. If desired, you can go to each of these
mailboxes and Option-drag the messages from the old mailboxes to the IMAP
ones. Holding down the Option key when dragging the messages will cause
Mail to copy the messages to the IMAP server. Your original messages
will remain in the POP mailboxes on your Mac in case something goes wrong.

Go back to Mail’s Preferences window, click on the POP account, and
uncheck Enable this account (in the Account Information tab, or
the Advanced tab on macOS 10.11 and earlier). You will be using
the new IMAP account instead, although the old POP settings, and any
messages that you didn’t transfer to the IMAP mailboxes, will still be
available should you want to go back to the old setup.

On your iOS device, tap on Settings ‣ Mail. For each of your
accounts, tap on the account name. At the top of the account settings it
should say IMAP or Exchange. If it says POP, you will need to
deactivate that account on the iPhone (by sliding the switch next to the
Mail setting) and then choose Add Account to re-add your account
as IMAP or Exchange.

For best results with SpamSieve—and for e-mail in general—we recommend a mail
host that:

Supports IMAP or Exchange (Not Just POP)

This will keep your mailboxes and messages synchronized across multiple
devices and let you use SpamSieve on your Mac for iPhone Spam Filtering.
IMAP is preferred, as it is supported by more mail clients.

This way you won’t be forced to change your address if you change ISPs, e.g.
due to switching cable to fiber or moving to a different city.

Can Use Your Domain Name

If your e-mail address is at a domain name that you control (rather than at
the provider’s domain), you won’t be locked into your current host should
you ever become dissatisfied with it. You’ll be able to easily switch to a
different host without having to change your e-mail address.

E-mail is important. If your mail provider does not offer the features that you
want, we recommend switching to one that does. FastMail, DreamHost, Pair, and Hover are some inexpensive hosts that we’ve used and
recommend. Other ones that’ve heard good things about are 1&1, Cotse.Net,
and LuxSci.

SpamSieve works with your e-mail program to filter out spam messages.
First, the mail program downloads new messages from the mail server. It
then passes the messages to a plug-in or AppleScript, which in turn
passes them to the SpamSieve application. SpamSieve analyzes the
messages to see whether they are spam. It returns the verdict to the
plug-in or script, which then directs the mail program to move the
messages to another folder.

Some of the e-mail programs that SpamSieve supports let you control the
order in which the rules (a.k.a. filters or mail actions) that you have
created process mail. How you order the SpamSieve rule is up to you. If
you get a lot of spam that matches the rules you use to organize your
mail, you might want to run the SpamSieve rule first. This will allow
it to find spam among all your messages. If you would rather deal with spam
manually than have any false positives, then you might want to run the
SpamSieve rule last, after all your other rules have been given a
chance to match and file away messages from known senders. Be sure to
check the SpamSieve preferences for additional filtering options.

For added safety, you can specify that addresses that you’ve sent mail
to will never send you spam. To do this in:

Apple Mail

Open the Rules section of Mail’s Preferences window and edit
the SpamSieve rule. Change the condition that says Every
Message to Sender is not in my Previous Recipients. Mail will
then assume that such messages are good, without showing them to
SpamSieve.

Entourage

Create an outgoing rule that uses this AppleScript
to add your messages’ recipients to SpamSieve’s whitelist.

Eudora

Open Eudora’s Junk Mail settings and make sure that Mail isn’t
junk if the sender is in an address book is checked. Eudora
automatically adds your recipients to its History List, which is
considered to be part of the address book.

Mailsmith

Create a rule that uses this AppleScript
to add your sent messages’ recipients to SpamSieve’s whitelist.

Outlook

Create an outgoing rule that uses this AppleScript
to add your messages’ recipients to SpamSieve’s whitelist.

Postbox

Select Do not mark mail as junk if the sender is in Collected
Addresses in Postbox’s Accounts preferences.

PowerMail

Create an outgoing filter that uses this AppleScript
to add your messages’ recipients to SpamSieve’s whitelist.

Thunderbird

Select Do not mark mail as junk if the sender is in Collected
Addresses in Thunderbird’s Account Settings window.

For Apple Mail, Eudora, Postbox, and Thunderbird the above settings will
completely hide these messages from SpamSieve. Thus:

You might not want to do this if you regularly receive spam
messages that are forged so as to appear as though they
were sent from one of your previous correspondents. SpamSieve
won’t see the messages, so it will have no chance of catching
them.

SpamSieve will not be able to auto-train itself with these
messages. You should be sure to manually train it with some
examples of these messages, so that it has seen some examples
of good messages with this type of content.

You can set your mail program to automatically delete old spam messages.
However, if you do this, you should still review your spam messages to make sure
that no good messages are deleted. Not only would you lose such messages if you
don’t correct all the mistakes, but SpamSieve would also incorrectly learn
that they are spam, leading to more mistakes in the future.

Mail also has a feature to automatically delete old spam messages from the
Junk mailbox. You can use this feature if you tell SpamSieve to put spam
messages in the Junk mailbox instead of the Spam mailbox.

If you do this, be careful not to use the Junk and Not Junk buttons that
will appear in Mail when the Junk mailbox is active; you should always use
the SpamSieve - Train as Good and SpamSieve - Train as Spam commands
instead. You can use the Customize Toolbar… command in Mail’s View menu
to remove the Junk button from the toolbar. Also, if you select a message
that SpamSieve has classified as spam, Mail will show a banner saying that you
marked it as junk. Ignore this.

If you want to store your spam locally (On My Mac) you can skip this
step. If you want to store your spam on the mail server, make sure that
Mail knows which mailbox is your Junk mailbox. To do this, create a
new mailbox under your account. Select it and choose Mailbox ‣ Use This
Mailbox For ‣ Junk.

Open Mail’s Preferences window and click on Junk Mail. If
Enable junk mail filtering is unchecked, and you can already see the
special Junk mailbox near the top of Mail’s mailbox list, you can
skip to Step 3.

Otherwise, make sure that Enable junk mail filtering is checked. Select
Move it to the Junk mailbox. If Mail asks whether you want to move all
the messages to the Junk mailbox, say No. Next, select Perform
custom actions. Then click the Advanced… button and edit the rule such
that the conditions don’t match any messages. For example, use these two
conditions:

Message is addressed to my Full Name

Message is not addressed to my Full Name

and set it to If all of the following conditions are met. Click
OK to close the sheet. Do not make any further changes to the Junk
Mail preferences.

Go to the Rules section of Mail’s preferences and change the
SpamSieve rule to move the messages to the Junk mailbox instead of
the Spam mailbox.

Go to the Mailbox Behaviors (or Special Mailboxes) tab of the
Mail’s Accounts preferences and select a time interval for Erase
junk messages (or Delete junk messages when). You’ll need to repeat
this for each account.

Note: Even though you are using the Junk mailbox, due to a bug in Mail,
the Erase Junk Mail command may be disabled.

Entourage

You can set Entourage so that when it quits it will delete all the spam
messages that are older than 7 days (or whichever interval you choose):

Choose Tools ‣ Run Schedule ‣ Edit Schedules.

Click the New button to create a schedule.

Set the name of the schedule to Delete Old Spam, the
When to On Quit, and the Action to Delete Junk
Mail from Junk E-mail (On My Computer).

Click OK to close the dialog.

Outlook 2016

Outlook 2016 does not support schedules.

Outlook 2011

You can set Outlook so that when it quits it will delete all the spam
messages that are older than 7 days (or whichever interval you choose):

Choose Tools ‣ Run Schedule ‣ Edit Schedules….

Click the + button to create a schedule.

Set the name of the schedule to Delete Old Spam, the When to
On Quit, and the Action to Delete Junk Mail from Junk
E-mail (On My Computer).

Click OK to close the dialog.

Postbox

See the Automatically delete junk mail older than setting in the
Accounts preferences.

Thunderbird

See the Automatically delete junk mail older than setting in the
Account Settings window.

As described in the Correct All Mistakes section, you need to tell SpamSieve
about messages that it misclassified so that it can learn from them. Also, the
sooner you correct SpamSieve the better. This presents a problem if you’re going
to be away from your Mac for a while, e.g. if you’re on a trip and using your
iPhone/iPad or Web mail. With the normal setup, you can leave SpamSieve running
on your Mac at home, and it will clean the spam out of your inbox, but aside
from remote-controlling your Mac there’s no way to train SpamSieve.

The drone setup lets you run SpamSieve on one Mac and train it from other
Macs, PCs, or iPhones. This setup requires Apple Mail, MailMate, or Microsoft Outlook 2011.

Here’s an outline of how it works:

All the computers check the same IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange account.

One Mac (the drone) downloads all the messages and filters them with
SpamSieve. The other computers (your notebook Mac, your PC at work, your
iPhone, etc.) are not running SpamSieve, yet they get a spam-free inbox. If
you’re using an iPhone, you may want to turn off push e-mail so that the
phone doesn’t notify you about new messages that would be put into the spam
mailbox, anyway.

If you’re sitting at the drone, you can train it normally using the
SpamSieve - Train as Good/Spam menu commands.

If you’re at one of the other computers, you can train it remotely:

If a spam message gets through, move it to the special TrainSpam
mailbox to train the drone. Periodically, the drone will train the
messages in this mailbox as spam and then move them to the spam mailbox.

If a good message ends up in the spam mailbox, move it to the special
TrainGood mailbox to train the drone. Periodically, the drone will
train the messages in this mailbox as good and then move them to the
inbox.

The Apple Mail drone checks the Train mailboxes whenever a new
message arrives in the inbox. This can even work when your Mac is asleep,
if you’ve enabled Power Nap. The
MailMate and Outlook drones check the Train mailboxes periodically,
according to a schedule that you set. The Mac needs to be logged into
your account, although you can also use other accounts via Fast User
Switching.

To set up the spam filtering drone:

Make sure that all the computers are set to connect to your mail
account via IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange.

This optional step will hopefully keep SpamSieve running if there’s a power
failure while you’re away from your drone Mac. Open System Preferences. In
the Users & Groups pane, set Mail or Outlook as a login item for your
account. Under Login Options, enable automatic login. In the Energy
Saver pane, set it to Restart automatically after a power failure.
(This option is not available on all Macs.)

Create two additional mailboxes in each mail account: TrainGood and
TrainSpam. (If you are using Apple Mail, you don’t have to do this,
as the script will create the mailboxes automatically.)

Note: If you don’t mind (or in fact prefer) having all of your spam go to
one account’s Spam mailbox, you can instead create a single pair of
training mailboxes in that account (and not create a Spam mailbox in
each account). However, this may make it more cumbersome to move messages
into the training mailboxes (e.g. from iOS or Webmail).

Continue following the instructions below for Apple Mail, MailMate, or
Outlook.

If you have a single mail account, follow the normal SpamSieve setup
procedure in the Setting Up Apple Mail section, with one change: in Step
2, create the new Spam mailbox in your server account instead of in On
My Mac. You’re now done with this step.

Note: If you get an error that there is already a Spam mailbox in the
server account, but you don’t see such a mailbox, it may be that Mail is
displaying it as the special Junk mailbox. Create a mailbox called
Junk on the server and tell Mail to show it under the special Junk
mailbox. (On macOS 10.12 and later, go to Preferences ‣ Accounts ‣ Mailbox
Behaviors and select it from the Junk Mailbox pop-up menu. On macOS
10.11 and earlier, select the mailbox and choose Mailbox ‣ Use This
Mailbox As ‣ Junk Mailbox.)

If you have multiple mail accounts:

Create a Spam mailbox in each account.

Instead of creating one SpamSieve rule, create one per account.
The name of each rule should be SpamSieve - Account 1 (where
Account 1 is the Description of your account). The conditions
of the rule should say:

Account Account 1

The actions should say:

Move Message Spam [the Spam mailbox you created for this account]

Mail may ask if you want to apply the rule; click Don’t Apply.

Download the Apple Mail - Remote Training
script file. Open it in Script Editor (a.k.a. AppleScript Editor) and add
your account name(s) at the top (as described here).

You can test that the script works by running it in Script Editor; it
should move any messages in the TrainGood mailbox to the inbox and
any messages in the TrainSpam mailbox to the Spam mailbox. Errors
will be reported in the All Messages section of the Console
application.

Go to Mail’s Preferences window and create a new rule at the top of
the list (above the SpamSieve rule) called Remote Training. (The
rule’s name must not start with SpamSieve.) The conditions should
say:

Every Message

The actions should say:

Run AppleScript […]Apple Mail - Remote Training.scpt

After choosing Run AppleScript from the pop-up menu, select the file
that you created in Step 2 (using either the pop-up menu or the Choose…
button).

Mail may ask if you want to apply the rule; click Don’t Apply.

If you want manually trained spam messages to go to the Spam mailbox
on the server rather than On My Mac, use the Change Settings command
to tell SpamSieve that you don’t want a local spam mailbox.

If you are using iCloud to sync your Mail rules between multiple Macs,
make sure that both the SpamSieve and Remote Training rules are
unchecked on all the Macs except for the drone.

If desired, you can set up keyboard shortcuts on any non-drone Macs for
moving messages into the Train mailboxes. In Mail’s View menu,
choose Show Favorites Bar. Then drag the TrainGood and
TrainSpam mailboxes to the favorites bar. There will then be keyboard
shortcuts for these messages in the Mailbox ‣ Move to Favorite
Mailbox submenu.

Make sure that each of your accounts has its own Junk E-mail mailbox.
This can be configured by going to the Accounts section of Outlook’s
preferences and clicking on Advanced… and then Folders.

If you have a single mail account, follow the normal SpamSieve setup
procedure in the Setting Up Outlook section. When choosing the folder in
the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule, be sure to choose the Junk
E-mail folder on the server (not On My Computer). You’re now done with
this step.

If you have multiple accounts, create twoSpamSieve - Move Messages
rules per account. The name of the first rule should be SpamSieve - Move
Junk Messages - Account 1 (where Account 1 is the name of your
account. It should say:

If all conditions are met:

Folder Is INBOX (Account 1)

Category Is Junk

Do the following:

Move Message Junk E-mail (Account 1)

The name of the second rule should be SpamSieve - Move
Uncertain Junk Messages - Account 1. It should say:

In Outlook, choose Tools ‣ Run Schedule ‣ Edit Schedules…. Click the
+ button and create a schedule called Remote Training. The When
should be Repeating Schedule with a duration of your choice. The
Action should be Rule AppleScript. Click the Script… button and
choose the Outlook-RemoteTraining.scpt file from Step 4.

Many aspects of SpamSieve are scriptable, and it is possible to
customize SpamSieve and extend its features using AppleScript. A
collection of commonly requested example scripts is available.

SpamSieve’s interface for integrating with third-party mail and news
programs is completely open. It is possible to add support for
additional programs simply by writing some AppleScripts or Apple event
code. SpamSieve’s AppleScript dictionary contains some basic
information about the supported commands. However, there are some
subtle, but important, points that are not discussed in the
dictionary’s documentation. If you would like to connect an application
to SpamSieve, please contact spamsieve@c-command.com for assistance.

Choose Mail ‣ Preferences… and click on General. Change the New
messages sound to None so that Apple Mail does not play a sound when spam
messages arrive. Change New message notifications to Inbox Only (or to a
custom smart mailbox that excludes your Spam mailbox). This will prevent
Mail from notifying you when you receive new spam messages. SpamSieve will
notify you only when you receive new good messages.

Sometimes Mail rules will not move messages that were processed immediately
after the Mac woke from sleep. If this happens, you will end up with spam
messages that are marked as spam but not moved from the inbox to the Spam
mailbox. You can work around this problem by quitting Mail before sleeping your
Mac or by changing the Energy Saver settings so that your Mac will not to go
to sleep automatically.

The issue described below for macOS 10.9 rarely affects later versions, but
there are still some cases where Mail is slow at moving messages when you train
them as spam or as good. To speed up the training, you can enable the
workarounds by using these special esoteric preferences links:

AppleMailTrainSpamGUIScriptingYosemite

Click this link to
enable the workaround for making SpamSieve - Train as Spam faster. The
first time you try to train a message, SpamSieve will ask you to give it
accessibility privileges. Then it will ask you to add your Spam mailbox
as a favorite in Mail. Thereafter, it will move the trained messages via GUI
scripting. If an error occurs, SpamSieve will move the message via the more
reliable but slower method. Click this link to
disable

AppleMailTrainGoodGUIScriptingYosemite

Click this link to
enable the workaround for making SpamSieve - Train as Good faster.
SpamSieve it will ask you to add your inbox as a favorite in Mail. Trained
messages will now move to the inbox that you added in the favorites bar,
whereas without the workaround SpamSieve will try to find the
appropriate account’s inbox. Click this link to
disable the workaround.

AppleMailChangeJunkStatus

Another potential slowdown is that Mail can hang when it’s telling its own
junk filter that the message is junk. Normally, SpamSieve tries to keep Mail
in the loop so that when you train a message as spam, SpamSieve tells Mail
that the message is junk. However, in rare circumstances a bug in Mail or a
slow mail server can cause Mail to freeze when setting the message as junk.
You can tell SpamSieve not to tell Mail’s filter that the message is junk
by clicking this link. Or, click this
link to go back
to the default behavior.

macOS 10.9

There is a known issue where Apple Mail on macOS 10.9 is slower at moving
messages via AppleScript. This can cause delays/freezes of up to 10 seconds when
using the SpamSieve - Train as Spam and SpamSieve - Train as Good
commands. SpamSieve includes workarounds to move messages faster by using GUI
scripting instead of regular AppleScript.

Click this link to enable
the workaround for making SpamSieve - Train as Spam faster. The first
time you try to train a message, SpamSieve will ask you to give it
accessibility privileges. Then it will ask you to add your Spam mailbox
as a favorite in Mail. Thereafter, it will move the trained messages via GUI
scripting. If an error occurs, SpamSieve will move the message via the more
reliable but slower method. Click this link to disable
the workaround.

AppleMailTrainGoodGUIScripting

Click this link to enable
the workaround for making SpamSieve - Train as Good faster. SpamSieve it
will ask you to add your inbox as a favorite in Mail. Trained messages will
now move to the inbox that you added in the favorites bar, whereas without
the workaround SpamSieve will try to find the appropriate account’s
inbox. Click this link to disable
the workaround.

Accessibility Troubleshooting

Due to an OS bug, SpamSieveHelper may not automatically appear in the
list of Accessibility applications. To add it manually, you can:

If necessary, click the lock button next to Click the lock to make
changes.

Command-click on the SpamSieve icon in the Dock to reveal the
SpamSieve application file in the Finder.

Control-click on the SpamSieve application file and choose Show Package Contents.

Open the Contents folder and then the MacOS folder.

Drag and drop the SpamSieveHelper file into the Allow the apps
below to control your computer list in System Preferences.

In rare cases, SpamSieve may report that SpamSieveHelper is not
checked in the Accessibility preferences, even though it actually is.
This typically means that macOS’s privacy database has been corrupted.
You can reset the database by entering this command in Terminal:

tccutil reset Accessibility

The Drone Setup

Aside from the GUI Scripting workaround (above), you can also speed up training
by following the Setting Up a Spam Filtering Drone instructions. Instead of
using the Message menu commands to train messages, you would move the
messages into the special TrainGood and TrainSpam mailboxes.

For each IMAP account that you have, go to the Advanced tab of Mail’s
Accounts preferences and make sure that Keep copies of messages for
offline viewing is set to All messages and their attachments. This
will prevent Mail from having to download the same content multiple times.

Add Sender to Contacts

Change the keyboard shortcut for Add Sender to Contacts to
Control-Option-Shift-Command-Y. This will prevent you from accidentally adding
spammy addresses to your address book, which would cause SpamSieve to think that
messages sent from those addresses were not spam. To change the shortcut:

Open System Preferences.

Click on the Keyboard icon.

Click on the Shortcuts (or Keyboard Shortcuts on older versions
of macOS) tab.

The keyboard shortcut for the SpamSieve - Train as Spam command is
Command-Control-S. The keyboard shortcut for the SpamSieve - Train as Good
command is Command-Control-G. You can change the keyboard shortcuts:

Open System Preferences.

Click on the Keyboard icon.

Click on the Shortcuts (or Keyboard Shortcuts on older versions
of macOS) tab.

SpamSieve sets the colors of spam messages to reflect how spammy it thinks they
are. The order, from most to least spammy, is: Blue, Gray, Purple, Red, Orange,
or Yellow. Good messages are left uncolored. Thus, if you are skimming the
Spam mailbox for false positives, pay the most attention to the yellow and
orange messages. The SpamSieve - Change Settings command lets you enable or
disable spam message coloring.

Spam messages caught by a server junk filter are not processed by SpamSieve
and, thus, not colored.

Using a [Score] Rule to Filter Spam Messages By Color

The Setting Up Apple Mail section of the manual shows how to create a single
rule in Mail that puts all the spam messages in a single Spam mailbox. You
can also use multiple rules in Mail to file messages into different mailboxes
(or otherwise process them differently) based on how spammy they are. The normal
SpamSieve rule looks like this:

To separate spam messages by color (spamminess), you should instead create two
or more rules. The first rule should be named SpamSieve [Score]. As above,
you probably want the conditions to be Every Message. When this rule is
applied, SpamSieve will calculate the spam score of the message and set its
color accordingly. The actions of the [Score] rule will be ignored.

Below the [Score] rule, you can create one or more rules that process
messages based on their color:

Each of these rules should have a name that starts with SpamSieve,
followed by one or more color names in square brackets. For example, to
make a rule that matches the most spammy Blue and Gray messages, you
would name it SpamSieve [Blue][Gray] (or SpamSieve [Gray][Blue]).
You can include additional descriptive text after the brackets to remind
you of what the rule does.

The rule conditions should be Every Message.

As a shorthand for listing all of the colors, you can simply write
[Spam].

To match non-spam messages you can write [White]. Additionally, if
you have rules to process every color and those rules’ actions either move
the messages or stop rule processing, any subsequent rules will
automatically apply only to the non-spam messages.

Example 1: Blocklisted Messages in Trash

To move blocklisted messages to the trash and other spam messages to the
Spam mailbox, you would need three rules:

and then choose View ‣ Sort By ‣ Flags. (The flag colors are chosen so that
the messages will sort in order of spamminess; this is why they do not match the
message colors.) When using this rule, you should set the
AppleMailTrainGoodClearFlags option in the Esoteric Preferences to have
SpamSieve clear the flags when training a message as good.

Currently, there is a bug (Radar 21468415) in macOS 10.11 where the feature
to sort by flags does not work.

If your preferred mailbox does not exist yet, simply rename the
Spam mailbox in Mail by selecting it and choosing Rename…
from the Mailbox menu. The SpamSieve rule in Mail’s
preferences should automatically update to reflect the new mailbox
name.

If your preferred mailbox already exists, open the SpamSieve rule
in Mail’s preferences and select that mailbox from the pop-up menu.

Change the mailbox for manually trained spam messages, i.e. when you use
the SpamSieve - Train as Spam command:

When prompted, enter the new mailbox name. This does not have to be
the same name as in Step 1. If a top-level mailbox with this name
does not exist, SpamSieve will create one when you train a message as
spam.

You can put a space at the beginning of the mailbox name so that it sorts to the
top of the list. Mailboxes can also be dragged and dropped to reorder them in
Apple Mail, although this does not affect the order on other devices the way
renaming does.

Example 2: Putting Spam in the Trash

Some people like to enter Deleted Messages in Step 2 so that messages
trained as spam are moved directly to the trash. This is safe because you know
for sure that those messages are spam. Incoming spam messages can still go to
the Spam mailbox selected in Step 1 so that you can review them.

It is also possible to select the trash in Step 1 so that incoming spam messages
go directly to the trash. Some people like this because Mail has a setting
(Preferences ‣ Accounts ‣ Mailbox Behaviors) to automatically delete old
messages from the trash. However, if you do this, make sure that you
periodically check to make sure there are no good messages in the trash. Not
only would you lose such messages if you don’t correct all the mistakes, but
SpamSieve would also incorrectly learn that they are spam, leading to more
mistakes in the future.

Normally the Spam mailbox is kept on your Mac, as this is faster and
doesn’t fill up your server account with spam. If you prefer to keep the spam on
your mail server (so that it’s available on all your devices), you can:

Go to Mail’s Mailbox menu and choose New Mailbox…. Use the
Location pop-up menu to select your IMAP or Exchange server, and
enter Spam in the Name field. Click OK.

If you are using Gmail, there is already a Spam mailbox on the server.
You can use this one instead of creating a new mailbox. To do this, you will
need to enter [Gmail] as the IMAP Path Prefix in the Advanced
section of Mail’s Accounts preferences. This will make the Spam
mailbox appear at the top level of the account in Mail’s mailbox list.

Open Mail’s preferences and find the SpamSieve rule. Select the
server mailbox that you want to use.

In Mail’s Message menu, choose SpamSieve - Change Settings. Enter
the name of the mailbox created in Step 1. When it asks you, “Should messages
marked using “Train as Spam” be stored in a local spam mailbox (rather than
on the server)?” click No.

If you had created a Spam mailbox under On My Mac as described in
the Setting Up Apple Mail section, it is now longer needed, and you
can delete it.

Now both the incoming and trained spam messages will go to the Spam
mailbox on the server. If you find a good message in the Spam mailbox
and you’re at your Mac, use the SpamSieve - Train as Good command as
normal. If you’re using an iPhone, iPad, Webmail, or a different Mac:

If you are using the regular SpamSieve setup, do not move the message
out of the Spam mailbox. Instead, when you get back to your Mac,
select the message and choose SpamSieve - Train as Good.

If you are using the drone setup, you can move the message to the
TrainGood mailbox. The Mac will automatically train it as good
and move it to your inbox.

Normally, SpamSieve puts incoming spam messages in the Spam mailbox, and it
colors them according to how spammy they are. You can customize this
behavior by editing the actions of the SpamSieve rule in Mail’s preferences.
For example, to mark the spam messages as read, click the + button at the
bottom of the rule sheet, and choose Mark as Read from the pop-up menu. When
all the messages in a mailbox are marked as read, Apple Mail will stop showing a
number next to the mailbox.

Do not add an action that changes the color of the message, as it will not do
what you expect.

SpamSieve normally puts the spam messages from all your Apple Mail
accounts into a single mailbox called Spam. If you want to have a
separate spam mailbox for each account, first create the requisite empty
mailboxes. Then, create one rule in Mail for each account. The
description for the rule should be SpamSieve - <AccountName> where
<AccountName> is any text that helps you identify the account. The
rule’s condition should be that the account is <AccountName>, and
the action should be to move the message to the spam mailbox for that
account.

As this example demonstrates, you can have multiple SpamSieve rules in
Apple Mail, with arbitrary conditions, so long as all of their
descriptions start with SpamSieve. It is recommended that you
arrange the conditions such that only one SpamSieve rule will be
applied to any given message.

SpamSieve normally filters all of the accounts set up in Apple Mail. If you want
to exclude certain accounts from filtering, you can edit the SpamSieve rule
to list only the accounts that you do want filtered:

When traveling, especially with a mobile device, you might want to avoid
downloading spam messages from the server. If your server and mobile device
support IMAP or Exchange, you can do this by following the instructions in the
Using a Spam Mailbox on the Server section.

If your mobile device only supports POP, you can do this by letting your Mac at
home filter the messages from your main mail account and redirect the non-spam
messages to the account that you access when traveling. The spam messages will
stay in the Spam mailbox on your Mac.

Open Mail’s Preferences window and click the Add Rule button. Enter a
description, such as “Redirect good messages to handheld.” Change the condition
from From to Every message. Then change the action from Move Message
to Redirect Message and enter the e-mail address of the account that you
check when traveling. Click OK. Finally, drag your newly created rule so
that it is just below the SpamSieve rule.

As described in the How should I configure the junk filter on my mail server?
section, we generally recommend turning off other spam/junk filters and only
using SpamSieve. If you choose not to do this you may end up in a situation
where server filters are putting spam messages in one or more Junk
mailboxes, while SpamSieve puts messages in the Spam mailbox. This section
describes different strategies for coping with multiple Junk/Spam
mailboxes in Apple Mail. This is especially useful if you are using a mail host,
such as iCloud, whose junk filter cannot be turned off. You should pick just
one of the lettered strategies below.

A. Have Separate Mailboxes for Each Spam/Junk Filter

Some users like having separate Junk and Spam mailboxes. If this is what
you want, just be sure to check both locations for false positives, so that no
good messages get stuck there. Only good messages in the Spam mailbox need
to be trained as good because good messages in the Junk mailbox are not
SpamSieve mistakes.

B. Use a Smart Mailbox to Show All the Spam in One Place

You can create a smart mailbox to show the contents of all the mailboxes in one
place. For example, it might look like this:

Contains messages that match any of the following conditions:

Message is in mailbox Junk

Message is in mailbox Spam

You will still have the separate (actual) mailboxes, but you will be able to
review all of your spam at once (in the smart mailbox).

C. Tell SpamSieve to Use the Junk Mailbox

You may not be able to change where your server filters put spam messages, but
you can change what SpamSieve does. You can tell it to put the spam in Mail’s
special Junk mailbox, which the server junk filters are probably already
using. The messages will still be stored under their respective accounts, but
there will be less visual clutter.

This setup requires macOS 10.9 or later. It will only work if Mail is
showing the special Junk mailbox at the top section of the mailbox
list. If the Junk mailbox is not visible, you can get Mail to show it
(without enabling Mail’s built-in junk mail filter) by following the
instructions in Automatically Deleting Old Spam Messages.

For each account, find the mailbox that the server junk filter is using
and tell Mail to show it under the special Junk mailbox.

On macOS 10.12 and later, go to Preferences ‣ Accounts ‣ Mailbox
Behaviors and select it from the Junk Mailbox pop-up menu.

On macOS 10.11 and earlier, select the mailbox and choose
Mailbox ‣ Use This Mailbox As ‣ Junk Mailbox.

Change the SpamSieve rule to move messages to the special Junk
mailbox rather than the Spam mailbox.

Choose SpamSieve - Change Settings from Mail’s Message menu and,
when prompted, enter Junk as the name of the mailbox for trained spam
messages.

Delete any Spam/Junk mailboxes that are no longer in use.

With this setup, the only way to tell whether SpamSieve or a server filter was
what classified a message as spam is to look in SpamSieve’s log.

D. Manually Re-filter the Junk Mailbox to Rescue Good Messages

The above methods put all your spam in one place, but they have the disadvantage
that the server filter may mistakenly put good messages in the Junk mailbox.
To consolidate your spam and have SpamSieve save you from this type of server
mistake:

Periodically, select all the messages in the Junk mailbox.

Go to Mail’s Message menu, and choose Apply Rules. SpamSieve will
move the messages that it thinks are spam to the Spam mailbox.

Any messages left in the Junk mailbox are probably good. You can then
move them to your inbox. (If there are any spam messages left, you should
train them as spam.)

E. Automatically Re-filter the Junk Mailbox to Rescue Good Messages

You can use the Apple Mail - Server Junk Mailbox
script to automate this sort of re-filtering. Whenever the script runs, it will
tell SpamSieve to examine the messages in the Junk mailbox, moving the spam
messages to the Spam mailbox and the good messages to the inbox. You can
optionally set it to mark the spam messages as read.

In order for SpamSieve to filter your mail quickly, your Mac needs to be awake
with the mail program running. Otherwise, there will be delays for iPhone spam
filtering and the drone setup. In the Energy Saver pane in System
Preferences, we recommend setting Computer sleep to Never (when on
Power Adapter). You can still save energy by setting the Mac’s display and
hard disks to sleep.

Newer Macs and versions of the OS support a feature called Power Nap, which can let SpamSieve run once per
hour even when your Mac is asleep.

Power Nap requires macOS 10.8 or a later for notebooks and macOS
10.9 or later for desktops. The supported Macs are listed here.

You need to enable Power Nap in the Energy Saver pane in System
Preferences. Notebooks have separate settings for enabling Power Nap
when on battery or AC power.

In order for Power Nap to work, the Mac needs to be connected to the
Internet, and Apple Mail needs to be running before you put the Mac to
sleep.

The Mac will suspend Power Nap operations if your Mac is likely to overheat.

When everything is set up as described above, Mail will check for new
messages and filter them through SpamSieve once per hour.

Choose Show Other Scripts from SpamSieve’s SpamSieve menu. This
reveals the MailsmithExtras folder, which contains AppleScripts
for use with Mailsmith. These make it possible for scripters to further
customize and automate the labeling and marking of messages in
Mailsmith. If you are using Mailsmith 2.0 and do not write your own
AppleScripts, you can ignore the MailsmithExtras folder.

You can add the AppleScripts to Mailsmith’s Scripts menu by copying
them to the Scripts folder inside the MailsmithSupport folder.
A filter such as the following may be used to change the labels of
incoming spam messages.

This filter will pass all messages along to SpamSieve for analysis. It
will set the Is Spam or Is Not Spam property of the message,
and change the label of the message if it is spam. This is roughly
equivalent to enabling SpamSieve in Mailsmith’s preferences, but
because it uses AppleScript it is more customizable. Additionally, you
can change the filter criteria to pass only select messages along to
SpamSieve.

SpamSieve colors spam messages in Outlook using one of two categories:

Junk

This is for messages that you mark as spam (using the SpamSieve - Train as
Spam command) and for most incoming messages that SpamSieve thinks are
spam.

Uncertain Junk

This is for incoming messages that SpamSieve thinks are spam, but whose
scores are below the uncertainty threshold. For more information about
scores and uncertainty, see the A spam message is uncertain if
preference.

Click the Check Now button, and SpamSieve will tell you whether a newer
version is available for download. By default, SpamSieve will automatically
check for new versions each time it is launched and once per day. You can
disable this feature by unchecking the Check for updates automatically
checkbox.

Updating

If a new version is available, SpamSieve will tell you what’s new in that
version. Click Download to have SpamSieve download the .dmg file for
the new version to your downloads folder. Click Download & Install to have
it download the .dmg and then update the installed SpamSieve application
to the new version. For more information, please see Updating From a Previous
Version.

Installing a Fresh Copy

You can hold down the Option key when you click Check Now to make
SpamSieve always download the latest version, even if your version is
already up-to-date. This is an easy way to download and re-install a fresh copy
of SpamSieve if your copy is damaged.

Privacy

To check for a new version, SpamSieve contacts a Web server at
c-command.com over a secure connection. SpamSieve transmits the
following information to the server: the name of the product (SpamSieve) and
its version, the version of macOS, the kind of Mac and processor,
whether SpamSieve has been purchased, the name and version of the current mail program, and the name of the current language. This
information is used to guide future development. No personal information is
transmitted.

Mac App Store

If you purchased DropDMG or EagleFiler via the Mac App Store, the Software
Update… menu command is not present, and updates are available via the App
Store application.

When you launch SpamSieve for the first time, the Purchase window will
automatically open. You can also open it by choosing Purchase… from the
SpamSieve menu.

Trial/Demo Period

SpamSieve has a free trial. During the trial period, SpamSieve is fully
functional; the only difference in behavior is that it will periodically remind
you that you are using the trial. To use SpamSieve in trial mode, you can
simply close the Purchase window.

The trial period lasts for 30 days. (After the 30 days, if you haven’t had a
chance to use SpamSieve very much, you can continue using it for up to a
total of 7 launches.) To use SpamSieve beyond the trial period, you must
purchase it. This entitles you to free updates and support.

Soon after paying, you’ll receive an e-mail with your serial number. Enter the
name and serial number from the e-mail into the Purchase window and click
Personalize. You do not have to “install the purchased version”; rather,
SpamSieve will then know that you have purchased and you can keep using it
as before—with all the preferences that you had set and data that you had
entered.

Reinstalling a Previous Purchase

If you need to re-install SpamSieve, you can simply re-enter your Serial
Name and Serial Number and click Personalize; there’s no need to
purchase again.

If you cannot find your serial number, click the Look Up My Serial Number
button. This will open a form where you can enter your e-mail address and look
up your order information.

License Information

A license for SpamSieve is good for one person or one computer. This means
that you can use it on your desktop Mac and your laptop, or you and your family
can use it (in separate user accounts) on a shared Mac. If there are multiple
users on multiple Macs, you should purchase multiple licenses. Discounts for
packs of 2, 10, and 50 licenses are available above. A family (all living in the
same household) can share a 2-user license. If you already have a single
license, you can upgrade to a family license. To do this, e-mail your old order
number to sales@c-command.com, and we’ll send you a coupon code.

Upgrade Policy

All maintenance releases (1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.6.1, etc.) and minor feature updates
(1.1, 1.2, 1.5, etc.) are free. We have a track record of many such updates, and
they have included significant new features. Major upgrades (2.0, 3.0) are free
if you purchased the previous version within the last six months. If you
purchased longer ago than that, you get a 50% discount. (Note: The upgrade
discounts are only available if you originally purchased direct from C-Command,
since the Mac App Store does not support upgrades.)

Mac App Store

The Purchase… menu command is not present if you purchased via the Mac App
Store. In that case, there is no trial period, and licensing is based on your
iTunes account rather than the number of people or computers.

This command installs (or updates) the plug-in that SpamSieve uses to integrate
with Apple Mail. If the plug-in is successfully installed, you will see the
SpamSieve commands in Mail’s Message menu. For more information, see the
Setting Up Apple Mail section of the manual.

This command installs (or updates) the AppleScript files that SpamSieve uses to
integrate with Entourage. Occasionally, the script files can become damaged,
causing Entourage to ask you to locate the SpamSieve application each time you
receive mail or try to train SpamSieve. Using this command to install fresh
copies of the scripts should fix that problem.

This command also makes sure that you have an Entourage category called
Uncertain Junk.

This command installs (or updates) the plug-in that Eudora 6 uses to
communicate with SpamSieve. It also disables any other Eudora junk mail
plug-ins, as they would conflict with SpamSieve. The SpamSieve Eudora
plug-in is installed in the folder:

This opens a folder containing AppleScript files for integrating SpamSieve with
DragThing, Emailer, Eudora 5.2, Outlook Express, PowerMail 4, and Mailsmith.
These can be installed by dragging them into the proper locations.

Opening the containing folder (using Command-Up-Arrow) reveals the scripts for
Entourage and Outlook, as well as SpamSieve’s plug-ins for Apple Mail and Eudora
6. Normally, there is no need to access these items directly, as SpamSieve can
install them automatically (see above). They are accessible here in case you
want to install them manually.

When you use this command, SpamSieve looks at the account information for any
e-mail programs that are currently running and adds any e-mail addresses that it
finds to the “Me” card of Contacts (previously Address Book). The “Me” card has
“me” written on top of the picture; to find it, choose Go to My Card from
the Card menu. SpamSieve uses the addresses on this card to determine when a
message that you receive includes your return address. This can help it detect
spam messages that were forged to look like you sent them, in conjunction with
the Exclude my addresses preference. Also, SpamSieve will avoid automatically
creating whitelist rules for addresses listed on the “Me” card.

This command will prompt you to remove any SpamSieve Mail rules, then uninstall
the SpamSieve plug-in and launch agent. The SpamSieve application and training
data files will remain. SpamSieve will then quit Mail itself so that the plug-in
code is unloaded.

This imports either good or spam e-mail addresses from a text file. For
each address, a rule is created on the whitelist (or blocklist)
that matches messages sent from that address. If such a rule already
exists, SpamSieve makes sure that it’s enabled. Rules in the opposite
list are not affected.

This feature is usually not needed, as SpamSieve will automatically create
whitelist and blocklist rules based on the messages that you receive.

Many file formats are supported: the addresses can be return- or
comma-delimited, or they can be mixed in with message text as part of a
mbox file.

To import addresses from Entourage, choose Export… from the
File menu and select the option to Export contacts to a
tab-delimited text file.

To import addresses from Eudora, ask SpamSieve to import the
EudoraNicknames file inside the EudoraFolder (which is
likely in your Documents folder).

To import addresses from Outlook, choose Export… from the
File menu and select the option for Contacts to a list
(tab-delimited text).

To import addresses from the macOS address book, open the Contacts
(previously Address Book) program. Select all the names in the middle
column and drag them to the desktop. This will create a .vcf file,
which you can import into SpamSieve.

You may be wondering why you would want to import addresses from the macOS
address book instead of using the Use macOS Contacts preference, or
why you would import addresses from Entourage or Outlook instead of using the
Use Entourage/Outlook address book preference. The difference is as follows.
When you ask SpamSieve to use an address book directly, it will always
consider messages from senders in the address book to be good—even if you
receive many spam messages that are forged to appear as if they were sent by
your friends.

When the addresses are imported to the whitelist, however, they are
subject to SpamSieve’s normal whitelist behavior. That is, if Train
SpamSieve whitelist is checked, when you receive a spam message from
someone on the whitelist, SpamSieve will disable the corresponding
whitelist rule. Subsequent messages from that sender will no longer be
whitelisted. In short, the address book is safer because it makes sure
messages from people in your address book always get through. The
whitelist is less safe, but it allows you to block forged spam messages.

If you prefer the address book behavior but don’t have all of your
addresses entered into the address book, you can use Import
Addresses… to create whitelist rules from your addresses, and then
select the rules and use this script to
convert the rules into address book cards.

This imports the words in a corpus that was exported in XML format.
This is the same format used by SpamSieve 1.x. Importing a corpus
merges it with the active corpus. To replace the active corpus with
the one you are importing, use the Reset Corpus… command before
importing.

The corpus is a collection of messages, both spam and good, with which
you have trained SpamSieve. SpamSieve’s Bayesian classifier analyzes
the contents of the messages and uses this information to predict
whether future messages are spam or good. The contents of the corpus are
managed by SpamSieve; therefore, once you’ve trained SpamSieve with a
message, deleting the message from your e-mail program will not affect
SpamSieve because the information from that message is stored in the
corpus.

The Show Corpus command opens the Corpus window so that you can
examine the words that SpamSieve has found in your e-mails. You can
click on the name of a column to sort by that column. Click again on
the column to reverse the sort direction. The meanings of the columns
are as follows:

Word

A word in the corpus.

Spam

The number of times the word has occurred in spam messages.

Good

The number of times the word has occurred in good messages.

Total

The total number of times the word has occurred.

Prob.

The probability that a message is spam, given that it contains the
word (and in the absence of other evidence).

Last Used

The date that the word was added to the corpus, or the date that it
last appeared in a received message (whichever is later).

You can copy the selected rows to the clipboard or drag and drop them
into another application.

With the window sorted by Word, you can type the first few letters
of a word to locate that word in the corpus. Similarly, you can sort by
one of the other columns and type a number to locate the first word
whose value for the sorted column matches the number you typed.

You can edit the spam and good counts associated with a word by
double-clicking on the number in the Spam or Good column.
Changing the numbers for important words can greatly affect SpamSieve’s
accuracy, so you shouldn’t make changes without good reason.

You can remove words that you don’t want in the corpus by selecting
them and pressing Delete.

This command removes all the words and messages from the corpus. (It
does not change the whitelist or blocklist.) After resetting the corpus,
you can retrain SpamSieve from scratch, and SpamSieve will let you use
your old messages in the retraining. Resetting the corpus and
re-training SpamSieve with a proper mix of recent messages can
increase SpamSieve’s accuracy and reduce its memory use.

Before you reset the corpus, SpamSieve automatically saves a backup in
case you need to go back to the old corpus. The backups are saved in
this folder:

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve/

(See the How can I open the Library folder? section.) To restore from a
backup, choose Import Corpus… from the File menu and choose the
appropriate Corpus<date>.plist file.

You can copy all the statistics to the clipboard using the Copy command in
the Edit menu or by clicking the Copy Stats button.

Normally, SpamSieve shows statistics for all the messages that it processed
since it was installed. Because the accuracy and the number of messages you
receive change with time, you may wish to only see recent statistics. Click
the Set Date… button at the bottom of the window to control which old
statistics are hidden from view. You can edit the date and time shown in the
sheet, or enter an entirely new date. SpamSieve will also accept dates
specified in natural language, such as “last Sunday at dinner” or “today.” The
Now button enters the current date and time.

If you’ve chosen a suitable date and the “Filtered Messages” section shows
zero filtered messages, that means that your mail program did not ask
SpamSieve to filter any incoming messages. You should check to make sure that
the mail program setup is correct.

SpamSieve keeps a log of which messages it has filtered, which messages you’ve
trained it with, and any errors that have occurred. The Open Log command in
the Filter menu opens the log file so that you can look at it.

Normally, there is no reason (aside from curiosity) to look at the log file.
However, if you believe SpamSieve is not working as it should, the log file
provides useful information about what SpamSieve has done.

“Predicted: Good/Spam” Log Entries

For each incoming message, there should be a log entry that says Predicted:Good or Predicted:Spam. Here are some questions that these entries can
help you answer:

Why did a particular spam message make it to my inbox?

If there is no Predicted:Good log entry for the message,
SpamSieve was never given a chance to analyze it.

If it says sender<address>inEntourage/Outlookaddressbook,
you might want to remove that address from Entourage’s address book
(then click Load while holding down the Option key) or uncheck
SpamSieve’s option to Use Entourage/Outlook address book.

If it says <From(address)IsEqualto"[…]">inSpamSievewhitelist, SpamSieve thought the message was good because (a) you
had trained a previous message from that sender as good, or (b) you
had received a previous message from that sender, SpamSieve thought
it was good for other reasons, and you had not trained the message as
spam (see the Correct All Mistakes section).

If spam messages are being predicted as good and you don’t understand
why, please send in a report.

Why is a particular good message in my spam mailbox?

If there is no Predicted:Spam log entry for the message,
SpamSieve did not move the message out of the inbox. In fact,
SpamSieve was never even given a chance to analyze the message.

Check the setup in your mail program to make sure that the
built-in junk mail filter is disabled and that SpamSieve is the only
rule that moves messages to the spam mailbox.

If there is a Predicted:Spam log entry for the message, the
Reason will say why SpamSieve thought the message was spam.

If good messages are being predicted as spam and you don’t understand
why, please send in a report.

“Trained: Good/Spam (Manual)” Log Entries

These log entries represent messages that you had trained as good or spam using
the menu commands in your mail program.

“Trained: Good/Spam (Auto)” Log Entries

These log entries represent messages that SpamSieve auto-trained. It’s normal
for SpamSieve to auto-train a message as good if it thinks that the message
isn’t spam. This will add the sender to the whitelist to ensure that future
messages from that sender get through to your inbox. If you later train the
message as spam, SpamSieve will disable (uncheck) the whitelist rule. Thus,
auto-training should not ordinarily cause problems unless you receive a large
flurry of messages from the same sender address, or if you forget to train the
message as spam and then the address remains enabled on the whitelist. For more
information, see the Auto-train with incoming mail section.

Searching the Log

If you have a question about a particular message, you can search the log to see
whether there’s a Predicted entry for it. It’s best to search the log using
Console’s Edit ‣ Find ‣ Find… command, rather than the Filter search
field in the toolbar.

This command opens the log file in a text editor such as TextEdit or
TextWrangler instead of
Console. This makes it easier to read and search large log files. You can
control which editor SpamSieve uses by choosing Get Info in the Finder on a
.txt file, changing the application in the Open with pane, and pressing
Change All.

The Show Blocklist command in the Filter menu opens the Blocklist
window. The blocklist consists of a list of rules. If a message matches one
or more enabled rules on the blocklist (and Use SpamSieve blocklist is
checked), SpamSieve will predict that it is spam. As always, SpamSieve does not
prevent you from receiving the spam messages; rather, the blocklist ensures
that they will go to the spam mailbox rather than the inbox. You can also
configure Apple Mail so that the blocklisted messages go directly to the
trash.

There is normally no need for you to manually create or delete blocklist rules
because SpamSieve learns to recognize your spam automatically. Thus, it’s OK
if you receive spam from constantly changing addresses; you don’t have to worry
about creating blocklist rules to match all of them. If a lot of spam is in your
inbox, your first step should be to follow the instructions in Why is SpamSieve
not catching my spam? rather than to create blocklist rules that may not be
needed or even used (e.g. if the real problem is that your mail program isn’t
set up properly).

Rules and Training

By default, the Train SpamSieve blocklist preference is enabled. This means
that SpamSieve will automatically create blocklist rules when you train a
message as spam. You won’t get spam from the same address or sender name twice.

SpamSieve will also disable (uncheck) matching blocklist rules when you train a
message as good. This prevents a bad blocklist rule from blocking similar good
messages.

Editing Rules

You can edit a rule’s Header or Match Style by clicking in the
corresponding column and selecting from the pop-up menu. To edit a rule’s Text
to Match, double-click the text. For more information about the available
options see the Rule Columns, Headers, and Match Styles section.

Deleting and Disabling Rules

You can delete a rule from the blocklist by selecting it and pressing Delete.
Generally, there is little reason to delete rules. SpamSieve is optimized such
that having lots of rules does not reduce performance.

If you don’t like what a rule is doing, you should uncheck the rule rather than
deleting it. This will prevent SpamSieve from re-learning the rule automatically
(see “Rules and Training” above). For example, say that you get forged spam
messages from your own address. When you receive such a message, and tell
SpamSieve that it’s spam, any rule on the whitelist with your address would be
disabled. This will enable future such spam messages to be caught. If you later
get a legitimate message from your own address and tell SpamSieve that it’s
good, the whitelist rule will remain disabled, so SpamSieve will still be able
to catch that spam. If you had previously deleted the rule instead of disabling
it, telling SpamSieve that the message was good would create a new, enabled
whitelist rule, which would prevent those spam messages from being caught.

Blocklisting Domains and Countries

You can tell SpamSieve to classify every message from a particular domain as
spam. For example, to block every message from Spammy Company, open the
Blocklist window, click the + button, and create a rule that says From
(address) Ends With @spammycompany.com. You can also create rules for
particular countries. For example, to block every message from an e-mail address
in Nigeria, create a rule that says From (address) Ends With .ng

Blocking Messages to Invalid Addresses

If you have your own domain name, it’s best to configure the server not to have
a catch-all address because that
would lead to your receiving spam messages send to addresses that are not even
valid. SpamSieve could filter out those spams, but it’s better if you can avoid
downloading them and cluttering your spam mailbox in the first place.

If you cannot configure your server in that way, you can use the Matches
Regex match style to create a blocklist rule that matches messages sent to
invalid addresses at your domain. For example, this regex:

^.*(?<!^sales|^support)@domain\.com$

would match all messages where the match field ends with @domain.com but is
not sales@domain.com or support@domain.com.

Finding Rules

You can type the first few letters of a rule’s Text to
Match to quickly locate that rule, or use the search field in the toolbar to
focus on a group of related rules.

This section explains the options available for each rule in SpamSieve’s
blocklist and whitelist windows.

Rule Columns

The meanings of the columns are as follows:

Date

The date that the rule was added to the blocklist.

Header

The part of the message that will be matched against the rule.

Match Style

How the rule text will be matched against the text from the
message’s header.

Text to match

The text that will be matched against the message’s header.

✓ (Enabled)

If this is checked, the rule is enabled. Disabled rules do not block any
messages, but they are useful because they prevent SpamSieve from
re-learning a rule that you don’t want. (See Rules and Training.)

Hits

The number of god or spam messages that the rule blocked, a rough
measure of how effective it is.

Rule Headers

When SpamSieve checks whether a message matches a rule, it compares the
part of the message named by the Header column with the contents
of the rule’s Text to Match column. The following are the message
parts that may be used in the Header column:

From (address)

The e-mail address of the message’s sender.

From (name)

The name of the message’s sender.

To (any address)

The e-mail addresses of the primary recipients of the message.
SpamSieve checks each recipient separately to see whether it
matches the rule.

CC (any address)

The e-mail addresses of the carbon copy recipients of the message.
SpamSieve checks each recipient separately to see whether it
matches the rule.

Reply-To (address)

The address that you would be sending to if you replied to the
message. This is often the same as the From address, but it could
also be a mailing list or an alternate address for the sender. If
the message does not specify a Reply-To, then the rule will not
match.

Any Recipient

The To and CC addresses.

Any Address

The From, To, CC, Reply-To, and SendTo addresses.

List-ID

For mailing list messages, this hidden header indicates
which mailing list the message was sent to.

List-Unsubscribe

For mailing list messages, this hidden header indicates how to
unsubscribe from the mailing list. Some mailing list messages that
do not have a List-ID header do have a List-Unsubscribe header.

Mailing-List

For mailing list messages, this hidden header indicates which
mailing list the message was sent to. Some mailing list messages
that do not have a List-ID header do have a Mailing-List header.

Received (any)

The Received headers contain information about the servers that
relayed the message on its journey from the sender to the recipient.

Return-Path

This header contains information about where the message originated.

Subject

The subject of the message.

Body (any text part)

The contents of the message. Some messages contain more than one
text part (for instance, plain text and HTML representations of the
same message). The rule matches the message if any of the text
parts matches the rule’s text.

Any Character Set

The character set often indicates the language of the message. Many
spam messages are sent using Asian or Cyrillic character sets, and
SpamSieve is pre-configured to block these. The IANA maintains a
list of character sets.

There are several different ways in which SpamSieve can compare the
text in the message’s header to the rule’s text. In all cases,
capitalization does not matter; lowercase letters are considered the
same as their uppercase counterparts.

Is Equal to

The message matches the rule if its text is exactly the same as the
rule’s text. This is the fastest style of matching. If you leave the
text blank, the rule will match messages that have blank values
for that header—for example when there is an empty Subject header.
Sometimes, messages (especially spam ones) omit headers. To match
an omitted header, enter <SpamSieve-Unknown-Subject>,
<SpamSieve-Unknown-From>, <SpamSieve-Unknown-FromName>, or
<SpamSieve-Unknown-To> depending on the header selected.

Contains

The message matches the rule if the message text contains the rule
text.

Starts with

The message matches the rule if the message text begins with the
rule text.

Ends with

The message matches the rule if the message text ends with the rule
text. This is useful for matching domain names. For example, to
match messages sent from Apple, you could create an Ends with
rule with text @apple.com.

Matches Regex

This is like Contains, except that the rule text is treated as a
Perl-compatibleregular expression. Regular expressions are
a powerful way of specifying patterns of text, for instance: e-mail
addresses that contain numbers before the @ sign or subjects that
are longer than 30 characters.

If the regular expression entered in the Text to Match column
is invalid, SpamSieve will color it in red, and it will not match
any messages.

The Show Whitelist command in the Filter menu opens the Whitelist
window. The whitelist consists of a list of rules. If a message matches one
or more enabled rules on the whitelist (and Use SpamSieve whitelist is
checked), SpamSieve will predict that it is good. The whitelist is most commonly
used for matching messages sent from particular addresses, domains, or mailing
lists.

There is normally no need for you to manually create or delete whitelist rules
because SpamSieve learns to recognize your good automatically. If a lot of good
messages are in your Spam mailbox, your first steps should be to check the
setup in your mail program and to check the log rather that to create
whitelist rules.

Rules and Training

By default, the Train SpamSieve whitelist preference is enabled. This means
that SpamSieve will automatically create whitelist rules when you train a
message as good. Once you receive one good message from a person, all future
messages will get through to your inbox.

SpamSieve will also disable matching whitelist rules when you train a message as
spam. This prevents a bad whitelist rule from letting through similar spam
messages.

By default, the Auto-train with incoming mail preference is enabled. This
means that if you receive a message that SpamSieve thinks is good, SpamSieve
will automatically add whitelist rules so that future messages from that same
sender are also classified as good. Thus, it is important to correct all the
mistakes to avoid having incorrect whitelist rules.

Editing Rules

You can edit a rule’s Header or Match Style by clicking in the
corresponding column and selecting from the pop-up menu. To edit a rule’s Text
to Match, double-click the text. For more information about the available
options see the Rule Columns, Headers, and Match Styles section.

Deleting and Disabling Rules

You can delete a rule from the whitelist by selecting it and pressing Delete.
Generally, there is little reason to delete rules. SpamSieve is optimized such
that having lots of rules does not reduce performance.

Spammy Whitelist Rules

It is normal to see spammy rules on the whitelist that are unchecked. This is
because of auto-training. When SpamSieve thinks an incoming message is good,
SpamSieve also adds a rule to the whitelist. SpamSieve may be wrong about that
message, and that’s OK. If SpamSieve makes a mistake and lets a spam message
through, when you train the message as spam it will disable the corresponding
whitelist rules. The rules will then be shown as unchecked. A disabled rule
won’t match any messages, so it won’t cause any spam to get through.

Do not delete spammy whitelist rules. This is almost never a good idea:

If the rules are disabled, you should leave them in place to prevent
SpamSieve from creating those incorrect rules again in the future.

If the rules are enabled, you should find the spam messages from those
addresses and train them as spam. Not only will this disable the rules,
but it will also update SpamSieve’s corpus and statistics.

Whitelisting Domains

You can tell SpamSieve to classify every message from a particular domain as
good. For example, to whitelist every message from Apple, open the Whitelist
window, click the + button, and create a rule that says From (address)
Ends With @apple.com.

Mailing List Messages

The whitelist has special support for mailing lists. If you train SpamSieve with
a good message from a mailing list, it will add a rule to the whitelist that
matches the message’s mailing list header (List-ID, List-Unsubscribe, or
Mailing-List). Then SpamSieve will know that all messages from that mailing
list are good, regardless of who sent them.

Codewords

You can use the whitelist to create codewords. For instance, you could create
a rule in the whitelist that matches subjects containing “eggplant” (or some
other word unlikely to occur in regular mail). You can tell select people to put
“eggplant” in the subject of messages that they send you, and then you can be
assured that their messages will get through, even if the sender addresses are
not in your address book or whitelist.

Finding Rules

You can type the first few letters of a rule’s Text to Match to quickly
locate that rule, or use the search field in the toolbar to focus on a group of
related rules.

This command creates a new rule in either the whitelist or blocklist.
This is useful if you want to add your own rules to the whitelist or
blocklist, rather than having SpamSieve learn the rules when you train
it with messages. For example, you could create a blocklist rule to
catch spam messages with a particular subject, or a whitelist rule to
always accept messages sent from a certain domain.

SpamSieve uses a variety of filters to determine whether messages are
spam or good. It consults the filters in the order listed in this
window. When a filter decides that the message is good or spam,
SpamSieve stops moving down the list. Thus, the order of the filters
makes a difference. You can see from the order that if a message’s
sender is on the whitelist, it will be marked as good even if the
Bayesian classifier would have predicted it to be spam. Normally this
is what you want; the point of a whitelist is that you can be sure that
certain messages will never be marked as spam.

SpamSieve learns as you train it, but training is not instant. Training
SpamSieve with a message will not necessarily give it enough information to
classify that message correctly based only on the words in the message. However,
once you have added a message to the corpus, SpamSieve knows whether it is
good or spam, even though it might not make the correct prediction based on word
probabilities. This option causes SpamSieve to see if it knows whether a message
is good or spam before trying to calculate its spam probability. This is
especially useful when testing the setup in your mail program. If SpamSieve has
seen the message before, it will always classify it correctly. You can disable
this option if you want to see what SpamSieve would have predicted if it did not
already know whether the message was good or spam.

With this option enabled, SpamSieve will never predict a message to be spam if
its sender’s e-mail address is in the Contacts (previously Address Book)
application.

You can add addresses to the system address book using the Contacts or Address
Book application (located in the /Applications folder), or directly from an
e-mail program that supports the system address book.

On macOS 10.8 and later, the first time you launch SpamSieve it will ask for
permission to access your contacts. You can change the access setting by opening
System Preferences, going to the Security & Privacy pane, clicking on the
Privacy tab, clicking on Contacts in the list, and checking or
unchecking SpamSieve.app. (Please note that the applications in the list are
not sorted alphabetically.)

Repeated Access Prompts

If the system keeps asking you for permission to access your contacts and does
not remember this between launches:

You may need to reset the privacy database by entering this command in
Terminal:

Enable this option so that spam messages with your own return address are not
marked as good. (Spammers sometimes forge the return address to be your own, in
an attempt to get through spam filters.) Disable this option if you send
yourself messages and want to make sure that they are never marked as spam.
SpamSieve looks on the “Me” card in Apple’s Contacts (previously Address Book)
application to determine which addresses are yours. The easiest way to add your
addresses to the “Me” card is to open your mail program and then use SpamSieve’s
Update Address Book “Me” Card command.

You can also use this feature to catch spam messages sent from certain
addresses in your address book. Normally, if you have Use macOS
Contacts checked, messages from addresses in your address book
will never be classified as spam. This is generally what you want, but
there may be one or two particular addresses that spammers keep forging.
By using Exclude my addresses and adding those addresses to the “Me”
card in Contacts, you can get SpamSieve to analyze the full contents
of those messages to determine whether they are spam. SpamSieve will
continue to use the other addresses in the address book as before,
always classifying messages from them as good.

With this option enabled, SpamSieve will never predict a message to be spam if
its sender’s e-mail address is in the the contacts list for Entourage or
Outlook. When you install SpamSieve, you should click the Load button to
make SpamSieve read in the addresses in the Entourage or Outlook address book.
The addresses are loaded into SpamSieve’s memory and stored in its preferences
file, but they are not displayed in the Whitelist window because they are
not whitelist rules.

Re-loading Addresses

Whenever you add addresses to the Entourage or Outlook address book, you
should go back to SpamSieve’s preferences and click Load so that SpamSieve
learns about the new addresses. (This is not necessary for addresses that have
already sent you e-mails, as SpamSieve will automatically see those messages and
add the addresses to its whitelist.)

If you remove addresses from the Entourage or Outlook address book, you should
hold down the Option key when clicking Load; this tells SpamSieve to forget
the old addresses before loading the new ones. Do not click Load while
Entourage or Outlook is downloading and filtering mail, as this may cause it to
freeze.

If you have multiple Entourage or Outlook identities, you can load the addresses
into SpamSieve in sequence. Click Load, then change to another identity and
click Load again, etc.

Sync Services

Prior to macOS 10.8, Entourage and Outlook could automatically synchronize
their address books with the system address book using a technology called Sync
Services. SpamSieve could access the system address book directly, so there was
no need for SpamSieve to load the addresses from Entourage or Outlook. As of
macOS 10.8, Apple has deprecated Sync Services, and customers report that it no
longer works reliably. Thus, it is recommended that you use the Use
Entourage/Outlook address book option instead.

If you have macOS 10.7, you may prefer to use Sync Services
since it is more automatic. If you have Outlook:

Open Outlook’s Preferences window and click on Sync Services. Make sure
that Contacts is checked and that it’s set to sync with On My Computer.
This will let Outlook to sync its contacts with the macOS address book so
that SpamSieve can access your addresses and know from the start that your
regular contacts aren’t spammers. (If the Sync Services list is empty, see
this page or this page.)

If you have Entourage:

Open Entourage’s Preferences window. If you see an option in the General
Preferences for Sync Services, select it and make sure that Synchronize
contacts with Address Book and MobileMe (or .Mac) is checked. This will
cause Entourage to sync its contacts with the
macOS address book so that SpamSieve can access your addresses and know from
the start that your regular contacts aren’t spammers.

The Habeas Safelist
is list of senders who agree to only send e-mail that meets Habeas’
stringent compliance requirements. With this option checked, SpamSieve
will consider a message to be non-spam if finds the sending mail
server’s IP address on the Habeas Safelist. This entails contacting
Habeas’ server to lookup the address, but there is little performance
penalty for doing this, since SpamSieve only contacts the server when
the message contains Habeas headers:

X-Habeas-SWE-1: winter into spring
X-Habeas-SWE-2: brightly anticipated
X-Habeas-SWE-3: like Habeas SWE (tm)
X-Habeas-SWE-4: Copyright 2002 Habeas (tm)
X-Habeas-SWE-5: Sender Warranted Email (SWE) (tm). The sender of this
X-Habeas-SWE-6: email in exchange for a license for this Habeas
X-Habeas-SWE-7: warrant mark warrants that this is a Habeas Compliant
X-Habeas-SWE-8: Message (HCM) and not spam. Please report use of this
X-Habeas-SWE-9: mark in spam to <http://www.habeas.com/report/>.

or:

Accreditor: Habeas
X-Habeas-Report: Please report use of this mark in spam to <http://www.habeas.com/report/>

Many spammers encode the contents of their messages with base-64 so
that filters cannot see the incriminating words they contain. SpamSieve
can decode and look inside these messages. This option causes it to
mark all such as spam, regardless of their contents, on the theory
that legitimate senders do not try to obscure their messages. This does
not affect messages encrypted with PGP or unencoded HTML messages.

This enables SpamSieve’s main spam detector, which uses the corpus and word
probabilities to identify spam messages. If you uncheck Use Bayesian
classifier, SpamSieve will stop examining the full contents of the incoming
messages, so this should only be done for testing purposes.

All e-mail programs can notify you when you receive new messages, but
some will also notify you even when all the new messages are spam. If
your e-mail program is not savvy in this way, you can turn off its
notification and let SpamSieve notify you only when there are new good
messages.

This makes SpamSieve play a sound when new good messages are received (as
described in the Notification section). To add a sound to the menu, copy the
sound file to the Sounds folder in your Library folder. (See the How
can I open the Library folder? section.) SpamSieve will also look for sounds
that are built into your installed e-mail programs.

You can adjust the Alert volume in the Sound Effects tab of the
Sound pane in System Preferences. If the volume is set to zero, the Mac
flashes the screen instead of playing the sound.

If you are not hearing the sounds, make sure that you have selected an
appropriate speaker in the Play sound effects through pop-up menu.

This option makes SpamSieve show the number of new good messages in its Dock
icon. “New” means “since the last time the number was reset”; it’s not related
to the number of messages that are unread. “Good messages” means “messages for
which there is a Predicted:Good entry in SpamSieve’s log.”

If there are no new good messages or if SpamSieve or the mail program is
frontmost, SpamSieve will not show any number (rather than showing zero).

Clicking the Dock icon, activating your e-mail program, or training SpamSieve
with a message will reset the count.

The slider lets you control the size of the number in the Dock icon.

If you’re using DragThing 5.3 or later, SpamSieve
can show the message count in its tile in DragThing’s process dock.

SpamSieve assigns each message a score between 0 and 100, and it considers
messages with scores 50 or greater to be spam. The farther the score is away
from the middle (50), the more confident SpamSieve is about whether the message
is spam. Put another way, if you are trying to double-check SpamSieve’s work,
you should focus your attention on the messages with scores closer to 50. If
SpamSieve has made any mistakes, it is more likely to be with messages scored at
70 or 30 than with those scored at 95 or 5.

Spam messages that SpamSieve thought were good (false negatives) are generally
easy for humans to spot. They tend to stick out amongst lots of good messages in
the inbox.

Good messages that SpamSieve thought were spam (false positives) are harder to
spot. They can be buried amongst piles of messages in the spam folder. To help
you find these messages, SpamSieve can notify you about uncertain spam
messages, i.e. the messages in the spam folder that you should focus your
attention on.

The pop-up menu lets you control the range of scores that SpamSieve considers to
be uncertain. For example, if you set it to 75 (the default), messages that
SpamSieve thought were spam but which have scores below 75 will be considered
uncertain.

Growl is a free, third-party application that can
enhance SpamSieve’s notification abilities. Once you have downloaded and
installed Growl, the next time SpamSieve is launched it will use Growl to notify
you when new messages arrive. If you are not using Growl, turn off this option
in order to improve performance.

The following notifications are available:

Good Message Count

This notification mimics the red number in SpamSieve’s Dock icon (see Show
number of new good messages in Dock). After a batch of good messages
arrives, it tells you how many new messages there are and then fades away.

Good Messages (in Address Book)

This posts one notification for each good message that arrives (where
the sender is in your address book), showing the message’s subject,
the first few lines of its body, and (if possible) a picture of the
sender.

Good Messages (Not in Address Book)

This posts one notification for each good message that arrives
(where the sender is not in your address book), showing the
message’s subject and the first few lines of its body.

Uncertain Spam

This notification helps you spot false positives by telling you when a
message has arrived that SpamSieve thinks is spam, but that may actually be
good. For more information, see the A spam message is uncertain if
preference. By watching these notifications, you can spot false positives
without having to look through the entire contents of the spam folder in
your mail program. Unlike the other notifications, Uncertain Spam
notifications will persist until you click to dismiss them. Clicking to
close the notification does not change whether SpamSieve thinks the
message is spam. For messages that are actually spam, you don’t need to do
anything. For messages that are not spam, you should find the message in
your mail program’s spam mailbox and train it as good.

You can customize the notification style and enable/disable notifications:

Growl 2.x

Open the Growl application and choose Preferences… from the Growl
menu. Click on the Applications tab and select SpamSieve at the left
of the window.

Growl notifications always include the message’s subject and sender.
This setting controls whether they also include the first few lines of
the message’s body. Including the message body provides more context,
which is particularly useful for Uncertain Spam notifications, but it
also uses more screen space.

If you allow duplicate messages in the corpus, training SpamSieve with
the same message twice will increase the corpus counts for the words in
that message. If you do not allow duplicate messages, the second and
subsequent trainings with that message will have no effect. By default,
duplicate messages are not allowed in the corpus. This is nice because
it means that you do not have to remember which messages you have
already trained SpamSieve with; accidentally training with the same
message more than once will not skew the data that you are providing to
SpamSieve. If you wish to intentionally skew the data, you can check
one or both boxes to allow duplicates.

This option causes SpamSieve to automatically train itself with newly received
messages based on their predicted categories. The whitelist will stay up-to-date
so that messages from previous correspondents are never marked as spam. Also,
after the initial training you would only need to train SpamSieve to
correct its mistakes. It would automatically learn from the other new
messages, as needed, trying to keep a proper balance of good and spam messages
in the corpus. As the corpus increases in size, the rate of auto-training will
automatically decrease to prevent it from growing too large.

Most SpamSieve users should keep auto-training on at all times. Reasons
that you might turn it off include:

Testing Purposes

If you’re trying to figure out why SpamSieve is processing a
certain kind of message in a certain way, turning off auto-training
reduces the interactions among SpamSieve’s components and makes it
easier to see what’s happening.

Unable to Correct Mistakes

When auto-training is enabled, it is imperative that you correct
SpamSieve when it makes a mistake; otherwise it will “learn” things
that aren’t true and begin making predictions based on that
incorrect information. If your mail program and filters are set up
such that you cannot tell when SpamSieve has made a mistake (or if
you can see the mistakes but sometimes forget to correct them), then
you should not use auto-training.

Multiple Copies of SpamSieve

If you are using multiple copies of SpamSieve (on different Macs) to
filter the same IMAP account, it’s hard to know which one(s) to
correct when a mistake is made. With auto-training off, you don’t
have to worry about that.

Bulk Processing

For example, if SpamSieve will be processing a large number of
incoming messages in a row, and you will not be able to correct any
mistakes until later. In this case, using auto-training could
magnify one or two mistakes into many, as SpamSieve would assume
that it had classified the earlier messages correctly, and learned
from that (possibly incorrect) assumption.

Delayed Corrections

If it will be a long time between when SpamSieve filters some messages and
when you can correct any mistakes, the situation is similar to Bulk
Processing, so you may want to turn off auto-training. If you’ll be away
from your SpamSieve Mac but have other mail access, you can eliminate the
delay by using remote traininng. See the Setting Up a Spam Filtering
Drone section.

With this option enabled, training SpamSieve with a good message will add the
message sender’s name and address to SpamSieve’s whitelist. This will make
SpamSieve classify all future messages from that sender as good. Training
SpamSieve with a spam message will disable the name and address if they appear
in the whitelist (unless you’ve changed DisableWhitelistRules in the
esoteric preferences).

Example

You receive an Amazon order receipt and train SpamSieve with
it as a good message. This puts auto-confirm@amazon.com on the
whitelist so that future order receipts are always marked as good. A
spammer might decide that auto-confirm@amazon.com would make a good
fake return address. If you receive such a spam, SpamSieve would mark
it as good because the sender was on the whitelist. If you then tell
SpamSieve that the message is spam, it will disable the whitelist rule
so that it can catch future spam messages with that return address.

With this option enabled, training SpamSieve with a spam message will add the
message sender’s name and address to SpamSieve’s blocklist. This will make
SpamSieve classify all future messages from that sender as spam. Training
SpamSieve with a good message will disable the sender’s name and address if they
appear in the blocklist.

With this option enabled, training SpamSieve with a message will add the
words from that message to SpamSieve’s corpus. It is highly
recommended that you train the Bayesian classifier, as it is what
SpamSieve uses to catch most spam messages.

This slider lets you adjust SpamSieve’s bias. The bias controls how
aggressive SpamSieve’s Bayesian classifier is at catching spam. When
SpamSieve is more aggressive, it is better at catching spam messages
that share some characteristics with your good mail. When SpamSieve is
more conservative, it will be better at marking borderline messages such
as order confirmations and press releases as good. This setting is very
powerful, and most users should stick to the middle range. It is also
not a substitute for training SpamSieve or making sure that it’s setup
properly. Only change the bias if SpamSieve is consistently making
errors in the same direction.

False negatives are spam messages that SpamSieve examined but didn’t think were
spam. This option causes SpamSieve to save such messages for later analysis.
Clicking the Show button in the Advanced preferences opens the folder
containing the saved messages. You can e-mail this folder, along with
SpamSieve’s log file, to spamsieve-fn@c-command.com. By looking at the messages that
SpamSieve missed, we can improve its algorithms to catch such messages in the
future.

No False Negatives Files

If the FalseNegatives folder is empty, even after enabling Save
false negatives to disk and training SpamSieve with an uncaught spam message,
there is probably a setup problem in your mail program. Use the Open Log
command to see whether SpamSieve made a prediction for that message.

Anti-Virus Alerts

It is OK for your anti-virus software to find viruses in the FalseNegatives
folder. For more information, see the Does SpamSieve protect me from viruses?
section. If you don’t want to see anti-virus alerts, you can either exclude the
FalseNegatives folder from scans or uncheck Save false negatives to
disk and delete all the files in that folder.

With this checked, SpamSieve will quit itself when you quit an e-mail
program, provided that there are no other mail programs running. This
prevents SpamSieve’s icon from filling up your Dock when it’s not
actually being used.

You can set esoteric SpamSieve preferences by clicking the links on this
page. Unlike with regular preferences, you must generally quit and re-launch
SpamSieve in order for an esoteric preference to take effect.

With macOS 10.11 and later, Apple Mail shows messages that its junk
filter (or a server filter) thinks are junk using a low-contrast
brown/gold/yellow text color. Click here to
have SpamSieve override this and display the messages with the traditional
black text color; for the default low-contrast text color click here.

Normally, when SpamSieve classifies an incoming message as spam, it tells
Apple Mail that the message is junk. This makes sure
that Mail will not display remote images for that message, thus
protecting you from Web bugs. You can also tell SpamSieve not to mark the messages
as junk. This will speed up mail filtering (especially on macOS 10.9), as
it will reduce the amount of communication with the mail server.

AppleMailShowOpenWindow

When SpamSieve’s Dock icon is hidden, the Apple Mail plug-in normally adds a
SpamSieve - Open Window command to Mail’s Message menu so that
SpamSieve’s commands are still accessible. If the plug-in is not able to
detect that the Dock icon is hidden, you can force it to show the Open
Window command or revert back to auto-detection.

Normally, SpamSieve analyzes
the contents of attached images and PDF files to help detect whether a
message is spammy. You can turn off this feature if you find that corrupt files
are confusing macOS’s imaging subsystems and leading to crashes.

SpamSieve is normally highly accurate at filtering out spam messages, and once
properly trained it will usually keep working well. If you notice a sudden drop
in the filtering accuracy, this is usually because of a problem in your mail
program’s setup, not because a new type of spam message is evading SpamSieve.
(Even if the setup initially worked, it can become incorrect over time due to
file corruption or iCloud syncing problems.) This section will help you to fix
such setup problems yourself. You can also ask for help if you need additional
assistance.

When you receive new messages, the mail program needs to send them to
SpamSieve for analysis. To make sure that it’s set up to do this, find
the Checking the <Mail Client> Setup section below that corresponds to
your mail program and follow the instructions in that section.

The mail program will only apply SpamSieve (and your other rules) to
messages that arrive in the Mac’s inbox and are unread.

Are you reading the messages on a phone or other computer before your
Mac sees them?

Do you have rules set up on your mail server (or SaneBox) that
move the messages out of the inbox?

SpamSieve keeps a log of all the messages that it examined and why it
thought they were good or spam. The Open Log section describes how the
log can tell you whether a spam message was missed because of the mail
program’s settings, SpamSieve’s settings, or SpamSieve’s training.

The mail program may be having trouble communicating with SpamSieve. To
check for communication errors, see the Sending in an Error Report
section.

For the best filtering accuracy, SpamSieve needs to be properly trained.

Go to the Junk pane of Mail’s Preferences window and make
sure that Enable junk mail filtering is unchecked.

Go to the Rules pane of Mail’s Preferences window and make
sure that you have a rule like the one shown in the Setting
Up Apple Mail section:

Make sure there is a check mark next to the SpamSieve rule,
indicating that it’s active.

Make sure that the rule’s name starts with SpamSieve.

Make sure that the rule’s conditions say Every Message.

Make sure that the rule does not have any Set Color actions.

Make sure there are no other rules that move spam messages to another
mailbox or the trash. (Exception: in rare cases, you may want to
create an “unwanted messages” rule, as described in the Correct All
Mistakes section.)

Drag the SpamSieve rule to the top of the list, if it isn’t there
already. (Exceptions: If you’re using the drone setup, the
Remote Training rule should be above the SpamSieve rule. If
you are using an “unwanted messages”, as in (e), it should be above
the SpamSieve rule.)

Even if the rule looks correct, it can help to delete it and create a
new one. (If you do this, be sure to click Don’t Apply when it asks
whether you want to re-apply the rules.)

iCloud syncing can cause problems with Apple Mail. If you are not
actually using Mail on multiple Macs, you can turn off its iCloud support
to prevent these problems. On macOS 10.10 or later, open System Preferences,
click on iCloud, click the Options… button next to iCloud
Drive, then uncheck Mail.app.

If training a spam message in the inbox as spam does not cause it to
change color and move to the spam mailbox, please see Duplicate Apple
Mail Accounts section.

Testing That the Rule Works

Select a spam message in Mail.

Choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam from the Message menu to
tell SpamSieve that it is spam.

Drag the message to your inbox and select it again.

Choose Apply Rules from the Message menu.

Note: This will also apply your other Mail rules.

If the message moved to the spam mailbox after Step 4, the rule worked.
SpamSieve will be able to catch other messages like this if it’s properly
configured and trained.

If the message did not move to the spam mailbox, there is some other problem
with Mail or SpamSieve. Please contact technical support and explain what happened when you
followed these instructions.

Make sure that each account has a unique name. You can edit the
Description field for an account to change its name so that it is
different from the other accounts’ names.

For example, you may have both an active POP account and an inactive IMAP
account for the same username and server. These might both be called
“Account A”. In this case, you could rename the inactive one to “Account A
Inactive” so that the names are different.

If you rename an inactive account, Mail will ask if you want to enable the
account. Click Leave Disabled.

The setup is correct if there’s a log entry (near the bottom) that says
Predicted:Good or Predicted:Spam and shows the subject for the new
message.

If you don’t see the expected log entries for new messages, please contact
technical support and explain what
happened when you followed these instructions.

Messages Classified as Spam But Not Moved to Spam Mailbox

If you see spam messages in your inbox, it might be because SpamSieve thought
they were good, but it might also be that SpamSieve thought they were spam but
Airmail was unable to move them to the Spam mailbox. To see whether this is
the case:

Choose Open Log from the SpamSieve menu. If the log entries for the
messages in question say Predicted:Spam, that means that SpamSieve
did correctly classify them as spam.

From Airmail’s Window menu, choose Operations. This will show a
log of Airmail’s actions, which may provide clues about messages that
Airmail tried to move out of the inbox.

Choose Junk E-mail protection… from Entourage’s Tools menu
and make sure it’s set to None.

Choose Mailing List Manager from Entourage’s Tools menu. If
there are any rules, for each rule click on the Advanced tab
and make sure that Do not apply rules to list messages is
unchecked. (If you continue to experience problems, try unchecking
each rule itself, to disable it.)

Choose Rules… from Entourage’s Tools menu and make sure that
you’ve created two SpamSieve rules, as shown in the Setting Up
Entourage section:

Make sure that the rules are of the proper type. That is, if you
have a POP mail account, you need two POP rules; if you have an
IMAP account, you need two IMAP rules.

Make sure that the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule says “if
any criteria” rather than “if all criteria.”

Make sure that the SpamSieve rules are at the top of the list.

Make sure that the SpamSieve - Move If Spam rule is above
the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule.

Make sure both SpamSieve rules have check marks next to their
names, indicating that they are enabled.

Make sure there are no other rules that move messages to the
Junk E-mail folder.

To test that the rules work:

Select a spam message in Entourage.

Choose SpamSieve - Train Spam from the Scripts menu to
tell SpamSieve that it is spam.

If the message’s category was changed to Junk after Step 4, the rule worked.
SpamSieve will be able to catch other messages like this if it’s properly
configured and trained.

If the message’s category did not change to Junk, there is some other
problem with Entourage or SpamSieve. Please contact technical support and explain what happened when you
followed these instructions.

The Setting Up Mailsmith section describes how to set up Mailsmith to filter
your mail using SpamSieve.

Make sure that you are using version 2.3.1 or later of Mailsmith.

Make sure that Use SpamSieve is checked in the preferences. If that
option is disabled:

Make sure you have only one copy each of Mailsmith and SpamSieve
installed. If there are any old versions in the trash, empty the
trash.

Launch SpamSieve directly from the Finder, by double-clicking its
icon. (Do not use the Dock icon or an application launcher.)

Launch Mailsmith (again, by double-clicking its icon).

Open Mailsmith’s Preferences window, and verify that the Use
SpamSieve option is enabled.

If you are using the Leave it in “(incoming mail)” option, make sure
that a deposit or transfer filter isn’t acting on the spam messages
before your spam filter can.

To test the connection between Mailsmith and SpamSieve, select a message
and choose Recalculate Spam Score from Mailsmith’s Message menu.
Then choose Open Log in SpamSieve and verify that a “Predicted” entry
for that message was added to the log.

Choose Junk E-mail protection… from Outlook’s Tools menu and make
sure it’s set to None.

Choose Mailing List Manager… from Outlook’s Tools menu. If
there are any rules, for each rule click on the Advanced tab
and make sure that Do not apply rules to list messages is
unchecked. (If you continue to experience problems, try unchecking
each rule itself, to disable it.)

Choose Rules… from Outlook’s Tools menu and make sure that
you’ve created two SpamSieve rules, as shown in the Setting Up
Outlook section:

Make sure that the rules are of the proper type. That is, if you
have a POP mail account, you need two POP rules; if you have an
IMAP account, you need two IMAP rules.

Make sure that the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule says “If
any conditions” rather than “If all conditions.”

Make sure that the SpamSieve rules are at the top of the list.

Make sure that the SpamSieve - Set Category rule is above
the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule.

Make sure both SpamSieve rules have check marks next to their
names, indicating that they are enabled.

Make sure there are no other rules that move messages to the
Junk E-mail folder.

Choose Accounts… from Outlook’s Tools menu. If you have any IMAP
accounts, click the Advanced… button, then click the Folders tab,
and make sure that it’s set to Move deleted message to this folder.
Otherwise, the caught spams may still appear on your iPhone.

Choose Preferences… from the Outlook menu and click on
Reading. Make sure that Hide IMAP messages marked for deletion is
checked. This will ensure that you do not see spam messages that were
caught on another computer.

To test that the rules work:

Select a spam message in Outlook.

Choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam from the Scripts menu to
tell SpamSieve that it is spam.

If the message’s category was changed to Junk after Step 5, the rule worked.
SpamSieve will be able to catch other messages like this if it’s properly
configured and trained.

If the message’s category did not change to Junk, there is some other
problem with Outlook or SpamSieve. Please contact technical support and explain what happened when you
followed these instructions.

If the message moved to the Junk E-mail folder and its category was changed
to Junk after Step 6, the script worked. SpamSieve will be able to catch
other messages like this if it’s properly configured and trained.

If the message’s category did not change to Junk, there is some other
problem with Outlook or SpamSieve. Please contact technical support and explain what happened when you
followed these instructions. Please include your Console log. There are also
links on the script page to enable
debug logging so that additional information is logged.

Make sure that the conditions for the Spam: evaluate filter
are not excluding the messages that you want SpamSieve to
filter. For example, try editing the filter so that it has just
a single condition that says Always.

Make sure that the Spam: evaluate filter is at the top of
the list.

Make sure that the Spam: actions filter is directly below
the Spam: evaluate filter.

To test that the setup works:

Select a spam message in PowerMail.

Choose Mark as Spam from the Mail menu to tell SpamSieve
that it is spam.

Choose Perform Filter ‣ Spam: evaluate from the Mail menu.

Click on SpamSieve’s icon in the Dock. Then choose Open Log from
the SpamSieve menu.

The setup is correct if the last entry in the log says Predicted:Spam and
shows the subject for the message that you had selected. SpamSieve will be able
to catch other messages like this if it’s properly configured and trained.

Otherwise, there is some other problem with PowerMail or SpamSieve. Please
contact technical support and
explain what happened when you followed these instructions.

SpamSieve is nearly 100% accurate, but only when properly trained. Here’s how
you can check the training:

Choose Show Statistics from the Filter menu. Does the
Corpus section show at least 100 spam messages and 100 good
messages? If not, follow the instructions in the Do an Initial
Training section.

If SpamSieve has misclassified any messages, it needs to know this
or its accuracy will decline. This is described in the Correct All
Mistakes section. If SpamSieve misclassified some messages and you
have not yet corrected its mistakes, do so now. If you’ve already
deleted the misclassified messages, it’s too late to correct the
mistakes; choose Reset Corpus from the Filter menu and then
follow the instructions in the Do an Initial Training section.

Check the percentage of spam messages in the Corpus section of
the Statistics window. It should be between 55% and 75%. If not,
train SpamSieve with more spam or good messages so that the
percentage is in this range.

Check the number of spam and good messages in the Corpus section
of the Statistics window. If the corpus is very large (more than
4,000 messages) and SpamSieve is not catching your spam, the
corpus may contain incorrect or obsolete messages that reduce
SpamSieve’s effectiveness and make it slower to adapt. Choose
Reset Corpus from the Filter menu and then follow the
instructions in the Do an Initial Training section.

Sometimes spammers forge one of your e-mail addresses and send you spam messages
that appear to be coming from yourself. If SpamSieve is not properly configured,
these spams will keep coming into your inbox even after you train them as spam.
(Yes, you should train them as spam if they get through to your inbox.) Once
you fix the configuration, SpamSieve will be able to catch these messages as
easily as any other spams.

Why does SpamSieve let these obvious spams into my inbox?

SpamSieve does what you tell it to do. Under the standard configuration, the
Use macOS Contacts option is enabled in SpamSieve’s preferences.
This is safety feature so that messages from people in your address book are
never marked as spam. If your address is in the address book and a spammer
sends a message from that address, SpamSieve will let it through to your
inbox. It will do this no matter how blatantly spammy the message is; doing
otherwise would counteract the safety feature.

How can I tell whether I need to fix the setup?

The Open Log section of the manual explains how SpamSieve keeps a log of
all the messages that it filtered and why it thought they were good or spam.
For each incoming message that SpamSieve thought was not spam, there is a
Predicted:Good entry in the log. If it says Reason:sender<address>inaddressbook or Reason:sender<address>inEntourageaddressbook,
that means that SpamSieve thought the message was good because it was sent
from an address that’s in your address book. If the address is one of your
addresses, please follow the instructions below. (If there’s no
Predicted entry for the message, please see the Why is SpamSieve not
catching my spam? section for instructions on checking the setup in your
mail program.)

How do I make SpamSieve catch these spams?

SpamSieve has a feature specifically for catching this kind of spam. For
messages sent from your address, SpamSieve will ignore the fact that your
own address is in your address book. It will apply its normal Bayesian
filtering engine to examine the entire contents of the message and evaluate
whether it is spam. To use this feature, you need to do two things:

Make sure that Exclude my addresses is checked in SpamSieve’s
preferences. This tells SpamSieve to pretend that your address is not
in the address book, thus bypassing the Use macOS Contacts safety
feature (but only for messages sent from one of your own addresses).

Tell SpamSieve which addresses are yours. You do this by listing
them on your card in the Contacts (previously Address Book) application.

If the addresses are already entered in your e-mail program’s
preferences, you can quickly add them by choosing Update Address Book
“Me” Card from the SpamSieve menu. If you have other addresses,
you’ll need to add them manually from the Contacts application. Add
the addresses to your card, making sure to enter them in the e-mail
address section rather than the phone number section.

Your card is the one that has your name and photo (or login image). It
says “me” on top of the photo, and in the name list it has a black
silhouette of a head and shoulders instead of a white address book card.
To find your “me” card, choose Card ‣ Go to My Card. If you don’t
have a “me” card, you can make one by creating a new card with your name
and addresses and choosing Card ‣ Make This My Card.

SpamSieve’s log file contains information about the incoming messages that it
has processed as well as the messages that you’ve trained it with. If SpamSieve
is not behaving the way that you expect, the log file can help pinpoint the
source of the problem.

To send in the log file:

From SpamSieve’s Help menu, choose Save Diagnostic Report… at
the bottom. (If you can’t launch SpamSieve to access its Help
menu, see below.)

Choose a location such as your desktop and click Save. Saving the
report may take a minute or so.

Create an e-mail to spamsieve@c-command.com and drag the DiagnosticReport.tbz
file into the e-mail message to include it as an attachment/enclosure.

If you can’t launch SpamSieve, you can access the log directly, rather than
using the automated diagnostic reporter. The log file is stored at:

/Users/<username>/Library/Logs/SpamSieve/SpamSieve Log.log

You cannot find the log file by searching your Mac because Spotlight does not
index the folder the contains it. Instead, you can find the log file by
following these instructions:

Note: In most cases, you can ignore old, dated log files, whose names end
with .log.bz2. Just send the SpamSieveLog.log file.

Drag the SpamSieveLog.log file into the message window in your
e-mail program to attach it to your message. The file should be included
as an attachment/enclosure, not as text in the body of the message.

To help troubleshoot problems in your mail program, please include
screenshots of:

Any errors that were reported (if applicable).

The message list in your mail program.

The rule list in your mail program (including both regular rules and mailing
list manager rules, if applicable).

The individual SpamSieve rule(s) that you created in the mail program.

To take a screenshot, hold down the Command and Shift keys and press the number 4.
Then use the mouse to select the area of the screen that you want to take a
picture of. This will create a file called ScreenShot<date>at<time>.png
on your desktop. Pressing the keys again will create ScreenShot<date>at<newtime>.png, etc.

You can also take screenshots using the File ‣ Take Screenshot command in
the Preview application.

To send in screeenshots, drag the files into your e-mail window to attach them
to your message. If you’re using Apple Mail, be sure to set the Image Size
pop-up menu at the bottom of the message window to Actual Size.

In the Advanced tab of SpamSieve’s Preferences window, make sure that
Save false negatives to disk is checked. When you train a message as spam
that SpamSieve thought was good, it will save that message as a file. Click the
Show button in the Preferences window to open the folder. You can then
drag the folder (or particular files in it) into the message window in your
e-mail program. You can use Quick Look to view the message files to help find
the ones that you want.

If a spam message gets through and is not saved in the FalseNegatives folder, this likely means that there is a setup problem and
that SpamSieve was not given an opportunity to filter that message.
Please see the Why is SpamSieve not catching my spam? page for
information about how to fix setup problems.

If a program is slow, hangs (e.g. with a spinning beachball), or freezes, a
“sample” report can record what your Mac was doing in order to locate the source
of the problem.

Click on Finder in the Dock.

From the Go menu, choose Utilities.

Double-click the Activity Monitor program.

Select SpamSieve in the Activity Monitor window.

Do whatever it is in SpamSieve that causes the slowness, hang, or freeze.
Immediately, click on Activity Monitor in the Dock and choose Sample
Process from the View menu.

After Activity Monitor has finished taking the sample, click the
Save… button in the “Sample of SpamSieve” window. Save the file
to your desktop and then include it in your e-mail message to
spamsieve@c-command.com as an attachment. (Please do not copy and paste the text
from the Activity Monitor window.)

(If you aren’t sure whether the problem pertains to SpamSieve or the mail
program, please repeat steps 4–6 for both SpamSieve and the mail program.)

If SpamSieve itself crashes, the SpamSieve Crash Reporter window should
automatically come up. Make sure that you enter a valid e-mail address and then
click the Send Report button.

If your mail program (or a helper process such as spamsieve-reader) crashes,
you’ll need to send in the crash log file manually.

Crash logs are stored in the folder:

/Users/<username>/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/

On Mac OS X 10.7 through macOS 10.12, first click on the Finder in the
Dock, then click on the Go menu, and hold down the Option key as you
choose Library. Open the Logs folder, then DiagnosticReports.

On Mac OS X 10.6, first click on the Finder in the Dock, then click on the
Go menu, and choose Home. Open the Library folder. Then open the
Logs folder, then DiagnosticReports.

Once you’ve opened the DiagnosticReports folder, find the most recent crash
log file for the program that crashed and add it to your e-mail message to
spamsieve@c-command.com as an attachment.

Note: You may be able to temporarily stop crashes in Apple Mail by removing
all of the .mailbundle files from the folder:

Make sure that you’ve disabled Mail’s built-in junk mail filter, as
described in Step 7 of the Setting Up Apple Mail section.

Make sure that the only spam/junk rule that you have in Mail’s
preferences is SpamSieve.

The name of the SpamSieve rule in Apple Mail must begin with
“SpamSieve”. Make sure that there are no leading spaces in the
name. If the rule name does not begin with “SpamSieve”, Mail
will move every message to the Spam mailbox without even
showing the messages to SpamSieve.

To separate the good messages in the Spam mailbox from the spam
ones, drag all the unread messages to the inbox. Then select them and
choose Apply Rules from the Message menu. (You can
alternatively use the Apple Mail - Move If Spam script
with the moveGoodMessagesToInbox option.)

Normally, as soon as you train one message as good, SpamSieve will add the
message’s sender to its whitelist. This means that SpamSieve will never
classify future messages from that sender as spam. Also, by default, SpamSieve
will never classify messages from senders in your contacts as spam.
Nevertheless, there a several reasons why such messages might keep ending up in
the Junk or Spam mailbox:

A junk filter on the server might be classifying the messages as spam.
This is especially likely to be the case if the messages are going to a
different mailbox than the one that SpamSieve uses. In many cases,
there is no visible switch to turn a server filter on/off, so it will be
on unless you create a specific rule to turn if off. Please see the How
should I configure the junk filter on my mail server? section.

Regardless of whether SpamSieve thinks a message is spam, the message can
still end up in the Spam mailbox if you have created other rules in
your mail client that move messages to the Spam mailbox. It is
recommended that you disable or delete such rules. Also make sure that
your mail client’s built in junk filter is off. To help isolate what
SpamSieve itself is doing, you can create a separate spam mailbox called
SpamSieve Spam and edit your mail program’s SpamSieve rule to use
that mailbox.

Another computer that accesses your mail account may have rules or a spam
filter that are moving the messages. You can narrow down which one is
responsible by temporarily setting each server filter or copy of
SpamSieve to use a different Spam mailbox. For example, set the copy
of SpamSieve on your MacBook to use a mailbox calledSpamSieveMacBook.

SpamSieve might have classified the message as spam. You can see whether
it has done this by using the Open Log command and looking for a
Predicted:Spam entry for the message.

How could this happen when you had trained similar messages as good? If you
train a message as good and then subsequently train a message from that same
sender as spam, SpamSieve will disable the whitelist rule and add a rule to
the blocklist. Then SpamSieve will classify messages from that sender as
spam until you train another one as good. At that point, there will be rules
on both the whitelist and the blocklist, both disabled, so SpamSieve will
determine whether messages are spam by looking at their complete contents.
If you don’t want it to do this, but to instead treat all the messages from
that sender as good, you can add the sender to your address book or find the
sender’s rule in the Whitelist window and click the checkbox to
re-enable it.

SpamSieve moves the spam messages that arrive in your inbox into a separate
mailbox, usually called Spam. When you train a message as spam, SpamSieve
also puts it in that mailbox.

You may find that you have a second Spam mailbox or a Junk mailbox that
is also filling up with spam. These spams were likely caught by a junk filter on
your mail server. The server filter catches its spam messages before the Mac
sees them, so:

It is normal for some spams to be in the server’s spam mailbox rather
than SpamSieve’s. SpamSieve never had a chance to process these messages,
so they are not mistakes. You should not train them as spam.

It is normal for there to be some good messages in the server’s spam
mailbox. These are also not SpamSieve mistakes, since the server filter
put them there without SpamSieve seeing them. You should not train them
as good.

SpamSieve is compatible with junk/spam filters that run on the mail server,
however we recommend that most users turn them off because:

In most cases, SpamSieve will catch the same spam messages (and more), so
the server spam filter is not providing much benefit. Exception: If your
Mac and SpamSieve will often be off or disconnected from the Internet, the
server spam filter can help keep spam off your iPhone during that time.

Server spam filters are more likely to mistakenly classify your good
messages as spam. Because the server filters the messages before they get
to your Mac, SpamSieve cannot “save” you from these mistakes. In some
cases, these good messages may be deleted sight-unseen or “lost,” only
visible when you log into a special spam quarantine mailbox via a Web
browser.

Server spam filters often move suspected spam messages to a special
mailbox, which is separate from your other accounts and from SpamSieve’s
Spam mailbox. (See “Spam in Other Locations” above.) Most users find
it simplest to review a single spam mailbox for all their accounts.

Turning Off Your Server-Side Spam Filter

Please find the “Turning Off” section below that corresponds to your mail
provider. Note that some mail hosts, such as Media Temple, have both per-account
and per-user spam filters, so there may be more than one switch to turn off. If
your mail provider does not let you turn off its spam filter, we recommend
switching to one of the Recommended Mail Hosts.

Re-filtering Messages Caught by the Server Filter

You can use the Apple Mail - Server Junk Mailbox
script to have SpamSieve save you from mistakes that the server junk filter made
by moving any messages that it thinks are good back to the inbox. It will also
consolidate the spam messages from all the accounts into a single spam mailbox
(the same one where SpamSieve is already putting your spam).

Bulk Mail and Quarantine

Some mail providers have a mailbox called Bulk Mail or a special Web site to
view messages that are “quarantined.” If possible, we recommend turning off
these features for the same reasons described above. Regardless, there are two
important points to keep in mind:

The server puts the messages in the bulk mailbox before SpamSieve sees
them. Thus, there is no setting you can change in SpamSieve to prevent
this from happening.

Since these messages are invisible to SpamSieve, it is not necessary or
recommended that you train it with them.

If you cannot turn off your server’s Bulk Mail mailbox, you can use the
Apple Mail - Server Junk Mailbox
script to have SpamSieve sort through the bulk mail for you.

You can optionally click Show advanced preferences, go to the
Backscatter section, and select With bounce spam: Do nothing to
have FastMail ignore messages where it thinks a spammer impersonated you
to send spam.

GoDaddy has two levels of junk mail filtering. The mail servers (both Exchange
and IMAP) have built-in global spam filtering (affecting all users) that cannot
be disabled. There are also per-user additional settings
that can be disabled by selecting Turn off filtering.

It is not possible to turn off iCloud’s junk filter, and iCloud deletes some
suspected spam messages without even putting them in your Junk mailbox.
Thus, iCloud is not one of our Recommended Mail Hosts.

Many mail hosts offer SpamAssassin or a
similar filter. Make sure the filter is set not to add **Junk**, [Spam],
or another tag to the message’s subject. Also, try to configure the filter not
to move the messages out of the inbox. It is actually good if you can leave the
filter on, but set so that it only tags the message’s headers (e.g. by adding
X-Spam-Status and X-Spam-Report headers). This will allow SpamSieve to
incorporate the work that the server filter has done into its analysis.

When you train a message in the spam mailbox as good, SpamSieve normally moves
it back to the inbox. Mac Mail programs do not automatically re-apply rules
(or SpamSieve) to old messages, so normally the message will stay in the inbox.

However, it is possible that a server filter or a mail program on one of your
other computers will see the message as new and move it elsewhere. The other
computer might think the message is spam and move it right back to the shared
server spam mailbox. Or, if the other computer is using a local spam
mailbox, it would move the message off the server and into the spam mailbox
on that computer. This would make it appear—on the first computer—as though
the message had disappeared.

Computer viruses generally do not cause problems for Mac users because there is
no automated way for them to execute their malicious code. If you receive a
virus in an e-mail attachment, it will not do anything if the message is just
sitting in your inbox. Even opening the attached file is not, by itself,
dangerous because macOS will not execute code from a single file. You would
need to, for example, decompress the ZIP archive and then double-click the
extracted .app file. Even if you do all this, the Mac is likely to warn you
that you are launching an unknown application.

SpamSieve will generally classify messages with viruses as spam and move them to
the Spam mailbox. This will prevent them from cluttering your inbox and
provide some protection if you access your mail on a Windows PC (where attached
.exe files can more easily cause harm).

Anti-virus Software

If you are running anti-virus software, it is normal for it to find viruses in
your Spam mailbox and in SpamSieve’s FalseNegatives folder (if you’ve
enabled the Save false negatives to disk preference). You can safely ignore
these warnings because the viruses are embedded in the e-mail messages and are
inert. It’s also safe to delete the false negative files; they are only used
when troubleshooting SpamSieve.

Anti-virus software such as Avira and Bitdefender can interfere with the
operation of Apple Mail. One manifestation is that the software will find
messages with viruses, which SpamSieve has put in the Spam mailbox, and
delete the message files or move them to a holding area. Mail will then report
errors because the files are no longer where it was expecting to find them, and
this may prevent you from deleting the messages in Mail. You can get rid of the
orphaned messages in Mail by rebuilding its database. However, it is better
to configure your anti-virus software so that it doesn’t touch Mail’s files. For
example, in Avira, go to the Real-Time Protection settings, then Basic
Settings, and change the Default action if a thread is found so that files
are notmoved into quarantine.

A Web bug is a tracking image in an
HTML-formatted e-mail message. The image is referenced on a remote server,
rather than included as an attachment to the message. When a mail client
displays the message, it loads the image from the remote server. When the server
receives the request for the image data, it knows that the e-mail has been read,
and it can record the address of the computer that requested the image.
Additionally, the image’s URL may include tracking information such as your
e-mail address, so the server can tell who read the e-mail.

Some legitimate mailing list providers use Web bugs to track how many of their
messages were read, when they were read, and where (approximately) the
recipients are located.

Spammers use Web bugs to track who is reading their messages. This lets them
tell which e-mail addresses are valid as well as which variants of their message
content get through spam filters. An e-mail address that is known to be valid is
likely to receive more spam.

SpamSieve protects you against Web bugs by telling the mail program not to load
remote images for messages that it thinks are spam. Since SpamSieve catches
almost all spam messages, you only risk triggering a Web bug if SpamSieve lets a
spam message through and you view that message. (If you know that a message is
spam and don’t want to select it to train it as spam, you can use the drone
setup and drag the message to the TrainSpam mailbox.)

For full protection, most mail clients have an option to disable the automatic
loading of remote images for all messages, rather than just known spams. The
downside to this approach is that to fully view a good message containing remote
images you would need to click an extra button to tell the mail client to load
the images.

Since SpamSieve is highly accurate, most users opt for the convenience of its
automatic protection. If you want full protection and don’t mind manually
loading the images for all your messages, follow the these instructions for your
mail client:

Apple Mail

In the Preference window, click on the Viewing tab. Make sure
that Display remote images in HTML messages is unchecked.

Airmail

In the Preferences window, click on the General tab. Make sure
that Autoload Remote Images is unchecked.

GyazMail

In the Preferences window, click on the Display tab. Make sure
that Show remote images in HTML messages is unchecked.

MailMate

In the Preferences window, click on the Security tab. Make sure
that Image Blocking is checked and set to All Messages.

Mailsmith

Mailsmith does not display remote images, so no setting is necessary.

Outlook

In the Preferences window, click on Reading. Make sure that
Automatically download pictures from the Internet is set to Never.

Postbox

In the Preferences window, click on the Privacy tab. Make sure
that Block loading of remote images in mail messages is checked.

PowerMail

In the Preferences window, click on HTML reader. Make sure that
Download external pictures if connected, for non spam messages is
unchecked.

SpamSieve does not have a feature to “bounce” spam messages back to the sender,
e.g. by sending an e-mail reply saying that the message was not delivered. Apple
Mail used to have a built-in Message ‣ Bounce command, but Apple has removed
it.

The thought behind bouncing is that a spammer will stop sending to your address
if he thinks that the address was invalid and his message didn’t get through.
Unfortunately, sending a “bounce message” back would be ineffective or even
counter productive for a variety of reasons:

Spammers probably don’t care. They have lists of thousands or millions
of e-mail addresses, and it’s cheap to keep sending messages to the
entire list. They may get paid based on the size of their list, no matter
whether all the addresses are valid. In any case, it wouldn’t be worth
the effort to prune it down.

You can’t contact them. Even if you believe that spammers care, your
bounce message probably wouldn’t get to them. Spammers use hijacked
machines and forged return addresses, so if you reply to a spam message
you’re likely sending your bounce to an invalid address or to an innocent
bystander.

If you could, it might be bad for you. There is a narrow window of time
in which rejecting a spam message might work. When the mail server is in
the process of receiving a message, it’s talking to the sending server,
and so theoretically it could communicate that the address is invalid. By
the time the message has been delivered to your account, downloaded by
the mail program on your Mac, and filtered by SpamSieve, this window has
long since closed. At this point, if the spammer were listening, he’d
already know that the message had been delivered. If you were able to get
a bounce back to him, he’d know that it was a fake bounce. The original
message must have gotten all through, so he should send you more spam.

Since bouncing doesn’t work, it would be a waste of your time and network
resources to do it. Including such a feature in SpamSieve would falsely imply
that it should be used.

SpamSieve does not prevent spammers from sending you spam. This is not possible
to do. However, since SpamSieve protects you from viewing the spam that you
do receive, the spammers will not see their messages get through, so they are
less likely to send you more.

SpamSieve also does not block spam messages from being received by your Mac.
This would be dangerous because if it made a mistake (no filter can be perfect)
you could completely miss a good message.

Instead, what SpamSieve does is make sure that incoming spam messages end up in
your spam mailbox rather than your inbox. No messages are deleted without your
knowledge, so you always have the opportunity to review them.

You can optionally configure SpamSieve so that messages from known spam
senders go directly to the trash rather than to the spam mailbox.

Good Messages

SpamSieve is designed with safety in mind so that, even if there is a bug in
SpamSieve, it will never prevent you from receiving good messages or damage your
local mail store. This follows directly from how SpamSieve works:

SpamSieve does not communicate with your mail server at all. It does not
need or affect your network connection or change whether your mail client
is online or offline.

Messages are not received through SpamSieve. It does not sit between
your mail client and mail server. Instead, after your mail client has
downloaded the new messages, it asks SpamSieve which of them are spam and
moves those to the spam mailbox.

SpamSieve does not read from or write to your mail client’s data store.
Instead, it simply decides whether a message is spam and lets the mail
client itself move the message from the inbox to the spam mailbox. If
SpamSieve thinks that a message is good, it doesn’t touch it at all.

SpamSieve does not affect how your mail program filters good messages. It
moves the spam message to the spam mailbox, where they stay; the good
messages are processed by your other rules as normal.

SpamSieve does not touch or even see your sent messages. It only sees the
messages that the mail client specifically sends to it for analysis: new,
unread messages that arrive in the inbox and messages that you manually
train it with.

Some spam filters make changes to the messages that they process, e.g.
adding subject or headers tags to indicate whether they are spam.
SpamSieve does not modify the messages in any way, so there is no
possibility of it damaging them.

Troubleshooting

If you are missing e-mail messages or seem to not be receiving them, here are
some things to check:

Because of the design described above, it is impossible for SpamSieve to
cause you to lose messages or to interfere with the connection between
your mail client and mail server. That said, people sometimes want to
“know for sure” that SpamSieve is not the cause of the problem. You can
see this by following the instructions in the Uninstalling SpamSieve
section to temporarily disable SpamSieve or completely remove it.

Use Web mail or a mail client on another computer or device to check the
contents of your various mailboxes. If the messages show up there but not
on your main Mac, you may need to rebuild your local mail database.

Make sure that you have not created any rules on your mail server, on
your mail client, or on another computer that delete messages or move
them to the spam mailbox or trash. For example, a rule on one Mac that
moves a message to a local mailbox will make it disappear from other
computers that access the same mail account.

Make sure that anti-virus software is not interfering. For example, if
you are using Avast Mac Security, make sure that Preferences ‣ Mail
Shield Settings ‣ Scan secured connections is unchecked. This can cause
hangs when Apple Mail is receiving messages.

Check SpamSieve’s log to see whether there are Predicted entries
for the missing messages. If so, this means that the messages went
missing after they were downloaded to the inbox on your Mac. If not, this
means that the messages never made it to your Mac.

You need to enter the serial name and serial number exactly as they appear
on your order confirmation e-mail. If you no longer have this e-mail, you can
look up the name and number. Launch SpamSieve and choose Purchase from
the SpamSieve menu. Then click the Look Up My Serial Number button.

No. We only recommend downloading SpamSieve from https://c-command.com and
from reputable download sites such as Apple and MacUpdate. The C-Command Store lists all the vendors that are authorized to
sell SpamSieve. Downloads from other sites may include adware or viruses.

are not authorized to distribute our software. They have been a source of
confusion
because they often appear in ads at the top of search results for Bing,
DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. We do not recommend downloading from these sites. In
many cases, they will say that they are offering an “official” copy of
SpamSieve that is anything but. In fact, the installer asks for your
administrator password, installs adware, and makes other changes that may damage
your Mac.

CNET’s Download.com offers a Direct Download Link, which is valid; however it
also offers a more prominent Download Now Installer Enabled link, which we
do not recommend. The CNET installer installs toolbar adware and changes browser
settings. This page
explains how you can remove the toolbar.

SpamSieve will automatically remember these settings when you update to a new
version.

A future version of SpamSieve will include a preferences checkbox for more
easily hiding and showing SpamSieve’s Dock icon, as well as a way to access this
preference while SpamSieve’s Dock icon and menu bar are hidden.

Opening Windows From Apple Mail

When SpamSieve’s Dock icon is hidden, its menu bar is inaccessible. Therefore, a
new command called SpamSieve - Open Window will appear in Apple Mail’s
Message menu after quitting and relaunching Apple Mail. This lets you
configure SpamSieve’s preferences, view the statistics, and access other parts
of SpamSieve’s user interface. With other mail programs, you will need to use
the Open Window script in order to do that.

When copying your SpamSieve setup to a Mac that didn’t previously have
SpamSieve installed, you’ll need to put the SpamSieve application file
in the Applications folder and do the setup in your mail program,
but you can skip the initial training process because of the files that
you copied above.

If you are copying the training data because you want to use SpamSieve on both
Macs (rather than just moving it from one to the other), please see the
SpamSieve and Multiple Macs section.

Restoring From a Backup

Restore the SpamSieve folder and the
com.c-command.SpamSieve.plist file that are mentioned above.

Although the SpamSieve application must be running in order to filter your mail,
it ordinarily runs in the background with no user interface visible. The Dock
icon can be hidden if desired, and you can also set it to quit when your
mail client quits.

Yes; many people do this to separate their personal and business mail, and you
can even use the two mail programs simultaneously. Whether you’re using multiple
mail programs or just switching from one to another, you just need to follow the
setup instructions once for each mail program. SpamSieve will automatically
share its training data, rules, and statistics among all the mail programs.

SpamSieve tries to read your macOS address book in order to prevent marking
messages as spam if they were sent by one of your known contacts. This is
controlled by the Use macOS Contacts preference.

It also reads which e-mail addresses are yours, in order to detect spam messages
that may have been forged to come from your own address. This is controlled by
the Exclude my addresses preference.

Normally, macOS will remember when you’ve given SpamSieve permission to
access the contacts. If it keeps prompting you each time SpamSieve is launched,
this is probably because you have modified your copy of the SpamSieve
application, breaking its code signature. It is no longer necessary to modify
SpamSieve to hide its Dock icon; please see the How can I hide SpamSieve’s Dock
icon? section.

The user library folder is stored at the path /Users/<username>/Library/.
The way to access it is different depending on which version of macOS you are
using:

macOS 10.12.3 and Later

The Library folder is hidden by default. To open it, click on Finder in the
Dock. Click on the Go menu at the top of the screen, hold down the Option
and Shift keys, and then choose Library. (Only one of Option and Shift is
needed, but due to an OS bug,
which one you need to hold down can vary. Thus, it is easier to hold down both.)

Another way to access the Library folder is to choose Home from the
Go menu, then type Command-Shift-Period to show invisible files, and then open the
Library folder.

Mac OS X 10.7 Through 10.12.2

The Library folder is hidden by default. To open it, click on Finder in the
Dock. Click on the Go menu at the top of the screen, hold down the Option
key, and then choose Library.

Another option is to go to your home folder, choose View ‣ Show View Options
and then make sure that Show Library Folder is checked.

Mac OS X 10.6

Click on Finder in the Dock, click on the Go menu, and choose Home. This
will show your home folder, and you can open the Library folder directly.

A damaged statistics database can cause SpamSieve to crash, report internal
errors, or show incorrect accuracy numbers in the Statistics window.
Database damage can be caused by crashes or disk errors.

If you have a backup from before the damage occurred, you can quit SpamSieve and
your mail program and replace the file:

The Setting Up Apple Mail instructions have you turn off Mail’s built-in junk
mail filter, so it will not put messages in the Junk mailbox. However, it is
normal for Mail to still show the Junk mailbox. (Older versions of macOS
would always hide the Junk mailbox when Mail’s filter was disabled.)

SpamSieve itself normally puts spam messages in the Spam mailbox, unless
you’ve changed this as described in the Changing the Name of the Spam Mailbox
section. You can tell which messages SpamSieve itself has processed by looking
in the log.

If your mail server has its own junk filter, it is normal for that filter to put
spam messages in the Junk mailbox. Because the messages are filtered at the
server level, they never arrive in your inbox. Your Mac therefore does not see
them as new messages, so it does not apply your regular Mail rules (or the
SpamSieve rule) to them. Since these messages are not SpamSieve mistakes,
you should not train them as spam.

As of April 2015, Apple has made its iCloud server junk filter much more
aggressive. It is putting a lot more spam messages (and also some good ones)
into the Junk mailbox. It also deletes some messages so that they do not
appear in any mailbox. This affects all icloud.com, mac.com, and
me.com e-mail accounts.

There is no way to turn off iCloud’s junk filter and prevent it from putting
messages in the Junk mailbox. There are, however, various ways to make
SpamSieve put its spam into the same mailbox that iCloud’s junk filter uses.
SpamSieve can even re-filter the messages in the Junk mailbox to rescue good
messages that iCloud put there. However, there is no way to rescue messages that
were deleted without being saved into a mailbox. Since iCloud’s junk filter
cannot be disabled, your only choice is whether or not to use iCloud’s mail
service as a whole. If iCloud is not meeting your needs, we recommend switching
to a different mail provider.

The Junk Bar and Messages Marked as Junk

It is normal for Mail to show a brown bar above some messages that SpamSieve or
a server filter classified as spam. SpamSieve marks the messages as junk to
protect you from Web bugs. Do not click the Not Junk button. If the
message is not spam, you should instead choose SpamSieve - Train as Good
from the Message menu.

Messages Moved to Invisible Junk Mailbox

In some cases—particularly prior to macOS 10.9—a server junk filter may
move messages to a Junk mailbox that is hidden in Mail. This happens because
Mail’s own junk filter is off, so Mail hides the special Junk mailbox, not
knowing that the server is using it. To fix this, you can tell Mail to use a
different mailbox as the special Junk mailbox so that it hides that
mailbox, and then makes the server’s mailbox visible:

Normally, the Message menu in Apple Mail should contain several SpamSieve
commands, as shown in Step 1 of the Setting Up Apple Mail section. If you
don’t see these commands, that means that SpamSieve’s Mail plug-in is not
loaded. If the plug-in is not loaded, you will not be able to train SpamSieve,
and Mail will move good messages to the spam mailbox without consulting
SpamSieve.

To re-install the plug-in, choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the
SpamSieve menu. Normally, this is all that you need to do. If you still
don’t see the SpamSieve commands in the Message menu after relaunching Mail,
try restarting your Mac. There may also be errors reported in the Console
that point to the source of the problem.

In rare cases, Mail may be set not to load plug-ins and “stuck” so that this
setting cannot be changed. To fix this, open the Terminal application and enter
these commands:

If you have multiple mail accounts, you may sometimes find that SpamSieve moved
the message to the inbox of a different account than the account that received
the message.

The reason this happens it that Apple Mail does not keep track of which account
received each message. Therefore, SpamSieve has to try to figure out the proper
account by looking at the addresses in the message and the addresses associated
with your accounts. Most of the time, this will work automatically. There are
some exceptions, however:

If you have multiple account aliases, SpamSieve will only know about them
if they are configured in Mail’s preferences. See “Adding Account
Aliases” below.

If you receive a “Bcc” message, where your address does not appear in the
“To” or “Cc” header, SpamSieve can’t tell which address it was sent to,
so it can’t determine the proper account. In that case, it will choose
the first account in Mail that is not disabled.

If you are using the AppleMailTrainGoodGUIScripting esoteric
preference described in the Faster Apple Mail Training section, this
bypasses SpamSieve’s telling Mail which inbox to use. The message will
always move to the inbox that you added to the favorites bar.

Adding Account Aliases

Some users configure multiple aliases
for a single e-mail account. For example, if your iCloud account is
john.q.public@icloud.com, you may also want to receive messages sent to
johnp@icloud.com.

Go to the Accounts tab of Mail’s Preferences window and click on your
account in the list. In this example, Mail’s preferences would have the User
Name entered as john.q.public. By default, the Email Address field
would say john.q.public@icloud.com.

In order for SpamSieve to know which account’s inbox to move a message to when
you use the Train as Good command, you should enter all of your e-mail
addresses (the main one and the aliases).

Enter the aliases into the Email Address field, separated by commas. In this
example, the contents of the Email Address field should be:

john.q.public@icloud.com, johnp@icloud.com

For regular IMAP, Exchange, and POP accounts, you can edit the Email Address
field directly. For iCloud accounts, first choose Custom from the Alias
pop-up menu so that the Email Address field becomes editable.

Per-Account Spam Mailboxes

Another way to help SpamSieve find the proper inbox is to have a separate spam
mailbox for each account. If you are using the standard setup, you have a
single spam mailbox stored On My Mac. If you instead use per-account spam
mailboxes, each spam message will be stored on the same account that received
the message. SpamSieve can then move the message to the inbox on that same
account, and the message will always end up in the right place.

A smart mailbox in Apple Mail is not a mailbox in the sense of “a place where
messages are stored.” Rather, a smart mailbox is a “saved search” across
multiple actual mailboxes. When you’re viewing a smart mailbox, the message list
shows the name of the mailbox that actually stores the message.

Thus, a smart mailbox that searches for unread messages will, by default, also
find unread messages in the Spam mailbox. To avoid seeing spam messages in
your Unread smart mailbox, make sure it’s set up as follows:

Mail shows a number next to the Spam mailbox to indicate how many unread
messages it contains. Sometimes you’ll see the number, but when you click on the
mailbox to see its contents you’ll see either no messages or no unread messages.
This may be because:

The unread messages are actually in a second mailbox, inside the
Spam mailbox. If there’s a triangle to the left of the mailbox icon,
click to make it point down. This will reveal any mailboxes inside and allow
you to access their contents.

Mail’s database is damaged so that the numeric display is out of sync with
the actual mail that’s stored on your Mac and/or your server. You can fix
this by rebuilding Apple Mail’s database.

If you can’t find your Spam mailbox, most likely it’s still there but Mail
is currently hiding it. To show the Spam mailbox:

From Mail’s View menu, choose Show Mailbox List if necessary so
that the mailboxes are visible.

Locate the On My Mac section of the mailbox list. It is typically
below the Mailboxes and Smart Mailboxes sections of the mailbox
list. You may need to scroll down in order to find this. (macOS may
have made the scroll bars invisible, but you can scroll down by
two-finger dragging on your Mac’s trackpad or by using the scroll ball on
the mouse.)

Move your mouse over On My Mac in the mailbox list. Then click the
Show button that becomes visible at the right.

Sometimes SpamSieve may classify a message as spam, and change its color in
Apple Mail, but the message does not move to the Spam mailbox; it remains
in the inbox. Here are some ways to fix this:

Make sure that your SpamSieve rule in Apple Mail looks like the one
shown in Step 3 of the Setting Up Apple Mail section of the manual. If
Mail loses track of the Spam mailbox, there may be no mailbox
specified in the rule’s actions, and so Mail will not move the spam
messages.

You can test that the rule works and that Mail is able to move the
messages by manually applying the SpamSieve rule. Select one of the
messages in the inbox that was marked as spam and choose Apply Rules
from the Message menu. You can check in the Open Log section of
the manual whether SpamSieve predicted the message to be spam. If it did,
but the message did not move, Mail may be encountering an error when it
tries to move the message. Please see Sending in an Error Report.

Sometimes Mail rules will not move messages that were processed
immediately after the Mac woke from sleep. You can work around this
problem by quitting Mail before sleeping your Mac or by changing the
Energy Saver settings so that your Mac does not to go to sleep
automatically. You can also use the QuitMailWhenMacSleepsesoteric
preference to make SpamSieve automatically quit Mail before the Mac
sleeps and launch it when it wakes.

Recent versions of Mail have problems communicating with certain mail
servers. Mail is more reliable at moving messages from the inbox to
another mailbox on the same server than it is at moving the messages to a
local mailbox. The Using a Spam Mailbox on the Server section of the
manual explains how you can store your spam on the IMAP or Exchange
server, so that Mail is better able to move it out of the inbox.

The top of the SpamSieve Support
page always has the latest information about compatibility and public beta
versions.

It is important (see below) to update SpamSieve before updating macOS. To
prevent macOS from updating itself without asking you, go to the App
Store section of System Preferences and make sure that Install macOS
updates is unchecked.

Compatibility With macOS Updates

SpamSieve is developed using best practices, so it ordinarily continues to run
normally when macOS is updated. That said, newer versions of SpamSieve are
better at recognizing the latest types of spam—and contain many other
improvements—so it’s best to run the latest version of SpamSieve that your Mac
supports. You can
easily update to the latest version by choosing Software Update… from the
SpamSieve menu.

Compatibility With Apple Mail Updates

If you are using Apple Mail, you may have to update SpamSieve each time you
update macOS. The reason for this is that SpamSieve uses a plug-in to
integrate with Apple Mail. Each time Apple makes a change to Mail—which it does
in most OS updates—there is a chance that the plug-in will stop working
properly. Depending on the nature of the changes, an old plug-in running in a
newer version of Mail could prevent Mail itself from working properly. (This has
never actually happened with the SpamSieve plug-in, but we can’t rule out the
possibility.)

Apple Mail Compatibility UUIDs

There are many Mail plug-ins, and Apple
understandably cannot test all of them, let alone their interactions with each
other. Thus, starting around macOS 10.6, Apple adopted a policy where each
plug-in declares (using UUIDs) which versions of Mail it has been tested with.
If a plug-in has not been tested with the version of Mail that you’re using,
Mail will not load it.

The advantage to this system is that it makes Mail more reliable; it will not
load any untested code. The disadvantage is that plug-ins like SpamSieve’s,
which make only a few hooks into very stable areas of Mail, usually do not
require any changes to work with the new version of Mail. When Apple updates
Mail, we have to ship a new version of the plug-in, with the new UUID to prove
that it was tested with that version; customers have to update SpamSieve and its
plug-in; but the new plug-in has the exact same code as the old one (aside from
improvements unrelated to OS compatibility). Nevertheless, the UUID system does
improve Mail’s reliability and does not cause problems so long as customers are
aware that they need to update SpamSieve (and any other plug-ins).

Timing of SpamSieve Update Availability

Typically we ship an update to SpamSieve the same day that Apple updates macOS.
Some customers have asked why SpamSieve updates do not become available until
after Apple has shipped a macOS update.

From macOS 10.1 through 10.8, we would test SpamSieve with pre-release
version of the OS. If a SpamSieve update was needed for compatibility with the
new OS, we would try to ship the update before that version of the OS was
released to the public. This was possible because there was generally only one
set of UUIDs for each public release of macOS.

With later releases of macOS 10.8 through macOS 10.12 (but not 10.10.3 through
10.10.5), there are new UUIDs for most pre-release versions of macOS. With
this new policy, we still test with pre-release versions of the OS, so we can
have a SpamSieve update ready to go, but we cannot actually ship it until after
the OS update ships. The reason for this is that the compatibility UUID that we
need to declare is not known until we have the final shipping version of the OS
update. This is the system working as designed: the UUID certifies that we have
tested SpamSieve on the exact version of the OS that is running on your Mac.

Update SpamSieve Before Updating macOS

The smoothest way to update macOS and SpamSieve is to update SpamSieve before
updating macOS.

The reason for this is that if you update macOS first, and then open Mail,
Mail will not load the old version of the SpamSieve plug-in. Without the plug-in
loaded, you will not see the SpamSieve commands in Mail’s Message menu, and
Mail will move good messages to the spam mailbox without consulting
SpamSieve. If you get into this situation, quit Mail and then update SpamSieve.
The next time you launch SpamSieve, it should detect that the plug-in was
disabled by an OS update and reinstall the plug-in. If this does not happen
automatically, you can choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the SpamSieve
menu.

On the other hand, if you update SpamSieve before updating macOS, you will
have the latest version of the plug-in when you launch the new version of Mail,
so Mail will not disable it.

Using Pre-Release Versions of macOS

If you are using a pre-release version of macOS, it will likely have a
different compatibility UUID than the shipping version of SpamSieve. There are
several ways to deal with this:

You can temporarily disable SpamSieve by unchecking its rule in Mail’s
preferences. This will prevent all your messages from going to the
Spam mailbox, but you will get spam messages in your inbox.

There are public betas of SpamSieve corresponding to public betas of
macOS. You can click
this link
(after installing SpamSieve) to sign up to receive beta versions of
SpamSieve via the built-in Software Update… command. When updating to
the beta, please read all of the release notes. You can click this link if you want
to stop receiving beta updates.

If you are using a newer pre-release version of macOS that does not
work with the public beta of SpamSieve, please try installing the Apple
Mail plug-in and then use the More Info button in the error window
to send us the error information via e-mail.

Previous versions of SpamSieve would let you hold down the Option key to
install the Apple Mail plug-in on non-supported versions of macOS.
This workaround stopped working with macOS 10.10 and has been removed.

Make sure that you also delete EnvelopeIndex-shm and EnvelopeIndex-wal (if they exist).

Once you’ve found the file, drag it to the trash.

Note: Rebuilding the index database is perfectly safe. Even though it
seems that you are deleting a file, Mail stores its primary copy of your
message data elsewhere. When you delete the damaged database, Mail
uses this primary copy to create a new index database.

Relaunch Mail. It will welcome you as if you haven’t used it before. This
step may take a few minutes, as Mail searches through all of your stored
messages to build your new database file. IMAP and Exchange messages will
need to be re-downloaded from the server.

A corrupt database for Mail’s built-in junk mail filter can cause Mail to crash
when processing incoming messages or when training messages with SpamSieve. To
reset the database, find the LSMMap2 file and drag it to the trash.

We try to ensure that SpamSieve is compatible with other Apple Mail plug-ins. Nevertheless, it is possible for another
plug-in—especially an old version—to prevent SpamSieve or Mail from working
properly.

Known Issues

GPGMail

There is a known bug in the
GPGMail plug-in that causes it to re-apply Mail’s
rules (including SpamSieve) to non-new messages and even to sent messages.

MailTags

MailTags has generally been fully
compatible with SpamSieve. Please make sure that you are using the latest
version of MailTags. If you encounter any problems, see if disabling it helps.

Troubleshooting

If you are using multiple Mail plug-ins and seeing hangs, problems launching, or
other unexpected behavior, it’s best to check whether the problem goes away when
only the SpamSieve plug-in is installed.

Mail plug-ins can be installed in the global Bundles folder (which not all
users will have):

Under normal circumstances, Apple Mail does not crash, whether or not you are
using SpamSieve. If you find that Mail is crashing, here are some things that
you can do:

First, please send us a crash report so that we can look into the
cause. Note that if you are seeing a spinning beachball cursor rather
than a crash report window, Mail is probably hanging rather than
crashing. In that case, you should instead record a “sample” log
of Mail during the hang.

Often, it helps just to restart your Mac.

Make sure that any other Mail plug-ins are updated to their latest
versions. If that doesn’t help, see whether disabling the other
plug-ins stops the crashes.

You can also tell SpamSieve not to mark the messages as junk if analyzing
the spam messages is causing Mail’s filter to crash. To do this, click the
link for AppleMailPlugInSetIsJunk in the Esoteric Preferences.

In macOS 10.10, there is an Apple Mail bug that can cause crashes if
you are using an Exchange account and have a rule that moves messages to
a mailbox on the Exchange server. To work around this, make sure that you
are using the standard setup with the Spam mailbox On My Mac.

In the Accounts preferences in Mail, for each account click on
Advanced and make sure that Automatically detect and maintain
account settings is unchecked.

Try renaming the SpamSieve rule in Mail to Move to Spam. This
will cause Mail to treat it like a regular rule, bypassing SpamSieve. If
Mail still crashes when applying the rule, this will show that the crash
is due to Mail moving the message to the spam mailbox and not because of
SpamSieve.

This test will cause Mail to move all incoming messages to the spam mailbox.
After the test, you can disable the rule, move the messages back to the
inbox, and use the Message ‣ Apply Rules command to re-filter them.

If Mail is crashing when applying the SpamSieve rule (regardless of
the results of #4) you can try using AppleScript rather than a regular
rule to move the messages to your spam mailbox. Because this uses a
different code path in Mail, it may bypass the source of the crash.
Please see the instructions with the Apple Mail - Move If Spam script.

SpamSieve works with a variety of mail programs. You could
temporarily use a different one, either for reading your mail or just for
spam filtering. With an IMAP or Exchange mail account, you will see the
same mailboxes and messages in each mail program.

Choose Show Other Scripts from SpamSieve’s SpamSieve menu.
Copy the files from the ForEmailerUsers folder into Emailer’s
AppleScripts folder:

You may need to quit and re-launch Emailer in order for it to notice
that you have installed the SpamSieve AppleScripts.

If you want SpamSieve to color messages that it thinks are spam, set
up a mail action in Emailer that looks like this (using the Define
Actions… button to set the “Run the AppleScript” action):

If, instead, you want SpamSieve to move suspected spam messages to a
Spam folder (that it creates automatically), set up a mail
action in Emailer that looks like this:

Now proceed to the Do an Initial Training section. To train
SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and then
choose SpamSieve - Train Spam from Emailer’s Scripts menu.
To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them
and then choose SpamSieve - Train Good from Emailer’s
Scripts menu.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose SpamSieve - Color If Spam or SpamSieve - Move If Spam from
Emailer’s Scripts menu.

Switch to SpamSieve by clicking on its icon in the Dock. Go to the
SpamSieve menu and choose Preferences…. Make sure that Use
Entourage/Outlook address book is checked and click the Load
button, then the Entourage button.

Choose Install Entourage Scripts from the SpamSieve menu. After
you quit and re-launch Entourage, you should see four SpamSieve items in
Entourage’s Scripts menu:

Choose Rules from Entourage’s Tools menu. Click on the tab
corresponding to the type of account you have (e.g. POP, IMAP, or Exchange).
If you have more than one kind of account, you will need to repeat steps 4–6
for each account type.

Click the New button. Change the name of the rule to SpamSieve - Move
If Spam.

Click on the empty space between Change status and Not junk E-mail.
Click Remove Action to delete the Change status action.

Click on the menu that says Set category and select Run AppleScript.
Then click the Script… button and Select the SpamSieve-MoveIfSpam\cmM file. This file is stored in the EntourageScriptMenuItems
folder (which is probably inside the MicrosoftUserData folder inside
your Documents folder):

Make sure that Do not apply other rules… is unchecked. The rule should
now look like:

Click OK to close the Edit Rule dialog.

Note: It is important that you create the rule exactly as shown. Do not
add additional actions below the action that runs the AppleScript. Such
actions would apply to all messages (not just spam ones), which is probably
not what you want.

Note: If you are using Gmail (via IMAP) or Exchange with Entourage, change
the criterion from All messages to Folder Is Inbox (<Account Name>).

Click the New button to create a second rule. Change the name of
the rule to SpamSieve - Move Messages.

Click on All messages and change it to say Category Is Junk.

Click Add Criterion. Click on From for the new criterion and
change it to say Category Is Uncertain Junk.

Click on if all criteria are met and change it to if any criteria are
met.

Click on the empty space between Change status and Not junk E-mail.
Click Remove Action to delete the Change status action.

Click on the menu that says Set category and select Move message.
Change the menu at the right from Inbox to Junk E-mail. The rule
should now look like:

Click OK to close the Edit Rule dialog.

Make sure that the SpamSieve - Move If Spam rule appears at the
top of the list in the Rules window. Directly below it should be
the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule. You can change the order by
dragging.

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and
then choose SpamSieve - Train Spam from Entourage’s Scripts menu
(as shown in the picture for Step 3, above).

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose SpamSieve - Train Good from Entourage’s Scripts menu.

The keyboard shortcuts for these commands are Command-Control-S and
Command-Control-G.

Note: The training commands will move locally stored messages to the
Junk E-mail folder or the inbox. Due to limitations of Entourage, they
do not move IMAP or Exchange messages. (Incoming spam messages will be
automatically moved to the Junk E-mail folder.)

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Apply Rule ‣ All Rules from the Message menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Entourage. The
Entourage Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.

Choose Entourage ‣ Preferences… and click on
Notification. Turn off the sounds and new mail
notifications, and let SpamSieve notify you only when you
receive new non-spam messages.

If you’re using an IMAP account, choose Tools ‣
Accounts. Edit the account and click on the Options
tab. Make sure that Always download complete message
bodies is checked and that Partially receive messages
over is not checked.

SpamSieve colors spam messages in Entourage using one of two categories:

Junk

This is for messages that you mark as spam (using the SpamSieve - Train
Spam command) and for most incoming messages that SpamSieve thinks are
spam.

Uncertain Junk

This is for incoming messages that SpamSieve thinks are spam, but whose
scores are below the uncertainty threshold. For more information about
scores and uncertainty, see the A spam message is uncertain if
preference.

Double-click the SpamSieve application and choose Preferences from
the SpamSieve menu. Make sure that Use Entourage/Outlook address
book is checked, and click the Load button. Then click on the
SpamSieve icon in the Dock and choose Update Address Book “Me” Card
from the SpamSieve menu (next to the Apple menu).

Choose Install Entourage Scripts from the SpamSieve menu.
Quit and re-launch Entourage; then you should see four SpamSieve
items in Entourage’s Scripts menu:

Now, set up a mail rule in Entourage that looks like this:

To do this, choose Rules from Entourage’s Tools menu. Click on
the tab corresponding to the type of account you have (e.g. POP). If
you have more than one kind of account, you will need to create an
identical rule for each account type. Click the New button. Change
the name of the rule to SpamSieve - Move If Spam. Then click just
to the left of Change status to select the first action. Click
Remove Action to delete the Change status action. Click on the
menu that says Set category and select Run AppleScript. Then
click the Script… button and Select the SpamSieve-MoveIfSpam\cmM file. This file is stored in the EntourageScriptMenuItems folder (which is probably inside the MicrosoftUserData
folder inside your Documents folder):

Note: It is important that you create the rule exactly as shown. Do not
add additional actions below the action that runs the AppleScript. Such
actions would apply to all messages (not just spam ones), which is probably
not what you want.

Click OK and drag the SpamSieve rule to the top of the list.

Now proceed to the Do an Initial Training section. To train
SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and then
choose SpamSieve - Train Spam from Entourage’s Scripts menu.
To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them
and then choose SpamSieve - Train Good from Entourage’s
Scripts menu. The keyboard shortcuts for these commands are
Command-Control-S and Command-Control-G.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Apply Rule ‣ All Rules from the Message menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Entourage. The
Entourage Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.

IMAP Accounts

Entourage v.X does not support moving IMAP (or Hotmail or Exchange)
messages via AppleScript. Thus, if you have one of these types of
accounts, the spam messages will not be moved to your Junk E-mail folder.
The best solution is to update to Entourage 2004 or 2008, which do not
have this limitation. If you do not wish to do this, here are some
possible workarounds:

If you do not require IMAP, you can try creating a POP account in
Entourage and re-entering your account information. Many IMAP
accounts also work via POP, and this will allow SpamSieve to move
the messages that it thinks are spam.

Create an Entourage rule that moves messages that SpamSieve has
marked as junk into another folder. After receiving mail, manually
apply this rule to the messages in your IMAP account.

Make a mail view of your IMAP account that looks for messages that
are not junk. In this way, you can view your good messages without
being distracted by the spam ones.

Rule Tips

Once an Entourage v.X rule runs an AppleScript or moves a message, it
cannot apply any more rules to that message. This limitation means that
extra steps are necessary to integrate SpamSieve into a complex set of
Entourage rules. The easiest solution is to update to Entourage 2004 or
2008, which are more flexible about how they handle AppleScript rules.
If you do not wish to do this, here are some possible workarounds:

One option is to order your rules so that Entourage applies the
SpamSieve rule after all your other rules. You can change the order
of the rules by choosing Rules from Entourage’s Tools menu
and dragging the rules in the list to change their order. With this
approach, you can filter your good messages into folders however you
want. Any mail that is not moved into another folder will remain in
your inbox. Then, the SpamSieve rule will either mark the spams as
junk or move them to a Junk E-mail folder. The disadvantage to this
approach is that SpamSieve cannot catch any spams among the messages
that were moved by your other rules.

Another option is to add the Run AppleScript action to each rule
that moves messages. For instance, suppose you have a rule that
moves all the messages from your Work Account account into a
Work folder. You could set up the rule as shown below.

Now, messages sent to that account will be moved to the Work
folder. Spam messages sent to that account will be moved to the
Junk E-mail folder. You can add the SpamSieve AppleScript action to
every rule that moves messages and also to a “catch-all” rule that
applies to messages that aren’t moved. Then SpamSieve will be able
to filter all the messages that you receive.

This section applies to Eudora 6.x. Please see the Setting Up Eudora 5.2
section if you need to setup Eudora 5.2 or Eudora 6 Lite.

Double-click the SpamSieve application and choose Install Eudora
Plug-In from the SpamSieve menu. SpamSieve will install its
plug-in, disable other junk mail plug-ins (which would conflict with
SpamSieve), and reveal the Eudora application file for you.

Note: If there is an error installing the plug-in, see the Installing
the Plug-In Manually section below.

Control-click on the Eudora application file, choose Show Package
Contents, and open the Contents folder.

Make sure that the EsotericSettings6.0 file is in the PlugIns
folder; if necessary, move it there from the PlugInsDisabled folder.

Make sure that the SpamWatchOSX and SpamHeadersOSX files are not
in the PlugIns folder; if necessary, move them to the PlugInsDisabled folder.

When you start up Eudora, you should see SpamSieve listed in the
About Message Plug-ins… window that is accessible from the
Eudora menu.

Note: The version number displayed in this window is the version of the
SpamSieve Eudora Plug-In; it will not be the same as the version number of
the SpamSieve application. The current plug-in version is displayed in
SpamSieve’s about box.

Choose Preferences… from the Eudora menu, scroll down to
the Junk Extras settings panel (which is at the very
bottom), and check Always enable Junk/Not Junk menu items.
Next, select the Junk Mail pane and make sure that Hold
junk in Junk mailbox is checked. The Junk Threshold slider
must be set to the middle position (50). If you are using
IMAP, make sure that Run junk scoring plugins on this IMAP
account is checked in the IMAP settings pane.

Eudora applies SpamSieve to all incoming messages. The Junk Mail
area of Eudora’s preferences lets you customize how Eudora interacts
with SpamSieve. Note that the Junk Threshold slider will
have no effect because SpamSieve always considers messages with scores
of 50 or above to be spam. Thus, you should set Eudora’s junk threshold
to 50 and use the slider in the Advanced tab of SpamSieve’s
preferences if you need to adjust its sensitivity.

Other settings in the Junk Mail pane do affect SpamSieve. For
instance, if you check Mail isn’t junk if the sender is in an address
book, then Eudora will not pass those messages along to SpamSieve; it
will assume that they are good. Note that Eudora always considers your
address to be in its address book, even though it may not be explicitly
listed there. Thus, if you receive spam that is forged so that it
appears to be sent from your own address, you must uncheck Mail isn’t
junk if the sender is in an address book in order for SpamSieve to
catch it.

To still have SpamSieve whitelist your address book, you can export
the Eudora address book to vCard and then import it into the macOS
address book, or use SpamSieve’s Import Addresses… command to import
the EudoraNicknames file.

The Junk Extras area of Eudora’s preferences lets you control some
additional settings, such as whether junk messages are removed from the
mail server.

Using SpamSieve with Eudora 6 is highly recommended. However,
SpamSieve can also work with Eudora 5.2, and some Eudora 6 users may
prefer the configuration described here because it is more customizable.

Choose Show Other Scripts from SpamSieve’s SpamSieve menu.
Move the SpamSieveEudoraHelper file in the ForEudora5.2Users folder to the Applications folder of your hard disk. You
will need to launch this applet the first time you use SpamSieve
with Eudora.

Also in the ForEudora5.2Users folder is the UninstallEudoraHelper file. Run this applet if you no longer want to use
SpamSieve with Eudora.

Create a mailbox in Eudora called Spam that is at the same level
as the In mailbox. When you receive new spam messages, SpamSieve
will move them to the Spam mailbox. It will also mark good
messages by setting their priority to lowest (indicated by two
downward pointing carets) and mark spam messages by setting their
status to transfer error (indicated by a red “X”).

Now proceed to the Do an Initial Training section. To train
SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them. Choose the
Filter Messages command in Eudora’s Special menu. Then
double-click Train Spam.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them. Choose
the Filter Messages command from Eudora’s Special menu. Then
double-click Train Good.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select one or more of them.
Choose the Filter Messages command in Eudora’s Special menu. Then
double-click Filter.

Setting Options

By configuring the SpamSieveEudoraHelper applet, you can tell
SpamSieve to process your good messages and spam messages in other
ways. First, quit the applet. Then open it using the Script Editor
program in the AppleScript folder of your Applications folder.
The top of the script contains the following lines:

You can change a false to true or a true to false to
set the options the way you want. For instance, to have SpamSieve not
move spam messages into a separate mailbox, change the true in the
first line to false. When you are finished making changes, choose
Save in Script Editor’s File menu, close the window, and then
re-launch the SpamSieve Eudora Helper.

The following limitations are due to problems with Eudora’s “notification”
interface. Because of these limitations it is recommended that you use
Eudora 6 and the SpamSieveEudoraPlug-In. The plug-in avoids these
limitations.

Eudora gives messages to SpamSieve after all the other
filters have run. It is not possible to change this ordering.

SpamSieve cannot filter messages that are moved by other filters.
For instance, if you have a filter that moves incoming messages from
Steve Jobs to a separate mailbox, SpamSieve will not mark any of those
messages as spam, even if a spammer pretends to be Jobs. This
limitation applies to both automatic filtering of incoming mail and
manual filtering of selected messages.

Sometimes the wrong message is marked. That is, SpamSieve may decide
that message A is spam and ask Eudora to mark it with a red “X”; in
rare circumstances, Eudora will instead mark some other message B
with the “X.” You can tell if this has happened by comparing
SpamSieve’s log to the way the messages are marked in Eudora. This
problem seems to occur when the In mailbox is sorted.

Sometimes SpamSieve never sees a message that should have been
filtered. You can tell if this has happened by the absence of that
message in the log. It may help to remove any “notify user” filter
action that you have set up.

Sometimes SpamSieve determines that a message is good or spam, but
Eudora does not mark it at all. You can tell if this has happened by
comparing SpamSieve’s log to the way the messages are marked in
Eudora.

SpamSieve cannot add or filter messages that are stored in the
Trash mailbox or in mailbox files outside the MailFolder folder
in the EudoraFolder. Note that this includes all IMAP messages.
To access these messages, first move them to a non-trash mailbox
file that is stored inside the MailFolder folder.

If you manually apply filters while Eudora is in the process of
downloading mail, Eudora will show the SpamSieve dialog box twice.
If this happens, just choose Skip the second time.

Sometimes Eudora erroneously shows the SpamSieve dialog when you
check for new mail.

Sometimes after a long delay in talking to the mail server,
Eudora stops notifying SpamSieve when it receives new messages.
You can work around this by quitting and re-launching the SpamSieve
Eudora Helper.

Open Outlook’s Preferences window and click on Sync Services.
Check the option to Turn on Sync Services for contacts and make sure
that it’s set to sync with On My Computer. This will let Outlook to
sync its contacts with the macOS address book so that SpamSieve can
access your addresses and know from the start that your regular contacts
aren’t spammers.

Switch to SpamSieve by clicking on its icon in the Dock. Choose
Install Outlook Scripts from the SpamSieve menu. After you
quit and re-launch Outlook, you should see four SpamSieve items in
Outlook’s Scripts menu:

Choose Rules… from Outlook’s Tools menu. Click on the source
list item corresponding to the type of account you have (e.g. POP,
IMAP, or Exchange). If you have more than one kind of account, you
will need to repeat the following steps for each account type.

If you had previously used SpamSieve with Microsoft Entourage,
delete any SpamSieve rules that Outlook brought over from your
Entourage setup.

Click the + button. Change the name of the rule to
SpamSieve - Set Category.

For a POP account, the If should say All messages. For
an IMAP account or Exchange, it should say Folder INBOX
(<Account Name>). (Note: You will need to create one Set
Category rule per IMAP or Exchange account.)

Click on the empty space between Change status and Not junk
E-mail. Click Remove Action to delete the Change status
action.

Click on the menu that says Set category and select Run
AppleScript. Then click the Script… button and Select
the SpamSieve-SetCategory.scpt file. This file is stored
in the OutlookScriptMenuItems folder (which is probably
inside the MicrosoftUserData folder inside your
Documents folder):

Make sure that Do not apply other rules… is unchecked. For a
POP account, the rule should now look like this:

For an IMAP or Exchange account, the rule should now look like this:

Click OK to close the Edit Rule dialog.

Drag the SpamSieve - Set Category rule to the top of the list.

In the Rules window, as before, repeat the following steps for
each type of account that you have.

Click the + button. Change the name of the rule to
SpamSieve - Move Messages.

Click on the pop-up menu for the If and change it to say
Category. Click on the pop-up menu for None and change
it to Junk. The criterion should now say Category Is Junk.

Click Add Criterion. Click on From for the new criterion
and change it to say Category. Click on the pop-up menu for
None and change it to Uncertain Junk. The criterion
should now say Category Is Uncertain Junk.

Click on if all criteria are met and change it to if any
criteria are met.

Click on the empty space between Change status and Not
junk E-mail. Click Remove Action to delete the Change
status action.

Click on the menu that says Set category and select Move
message. Change the menu at the right from Inbox to Junk
E-mail. The rule should now look like:

Click OK to close the Edit Rule dialog.

Drag the SpamSieve - Move Messages rule so that it is just
below the SpamSieve - Set Category rule(s) (and above your
other rules).

Now proceed to the Do an Initial Training section. To train
SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and then
choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam from Outlook’s Scripts menu.
To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them
and then choose SpamSieve - Train as Good from Outlook’s
Scripts menu. The keyboard shortcuts for these commands are
Command-Control-S and Command-Control-G.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Rules ‣ Apply All from the Message menu.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Outlook. The
Outlook Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.

These instructions apply to Outlook Express, an old Microsoft e-mail program
that runs in Classic.

Choose Show Other Scripts from SpamSieve’s SpamSieve menu.
Copy the files from the ForOutlookExpress5Users folder to
the ScriptMenuItems folder inside the MicrosoftUserData
folder (which is likely in your Documents folder).

Choose Show Other Scripts from SpamSieve’s SpamSieve menu.
Copy the files from the ForPowerMail4.xUsers folder to the
PowerMailScripts folder inside the PowerMailFiles folder.
The PowerMailFiles folder is probably located in your
Documents folder.

If you want SpamSieve to label messages that it thinks are spam, set
up a filter in PowerMail that looks like this:

If, instead, you want SpamSieve to move suspected spam messages to a
Spam folder (that it creates automatically), set up the filter
to use the SpamSieve-MoveIfSpam script instead.

Now proceed to the Do an Initial Training section. To train
SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and then
choose SpamSieve - Train Spam from PowerMail’s Scripts menu.
To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them
and then choose SpamSieve - Train Good from PowerMail’s
Scripts menu.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose SpamSieve - Label If Spam or SpamSieve - Move If Spam from
PowerMail’s Scripts menu.

IMAP Accounts

PowerMail does not support moving IMAP messages via AppleScript. Thus, if
you use IMAP the SpamSieve - Move If Spam script will not move spam
messages into your Spam folder. IMAP users should create the rule that
uses the labeling script.

Click the Install button in the window that just opened.
Thunderbird will ask you to select a file.

Click on Desktop, select the SpamSieveThunderbirdPlug-In.xpi file, and click Open.

Click the Install now button.

Quit Thunderbird and re-launch it. If you now go to the
Tools menu and choose Add-ons you should see the SpamSieve
Thunderbird Plug-In listed there. Next to it will be the version of the
plug-in. The current plug-in version is always listed at the bottom of
SpamSieve’s about box. You can now delete the SpamSieveThunderbirdPlug-In.xpi file from your desktop.

Choose Account Settings from the Tools menu. For each of
your accounts in the list at the left (plus “Local Folders”), click
on Junk Settings and make sure that:

To train SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ As Junk or click the Junk button in
the toolbar.

To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or more of them and
then choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ As Not Junk or click the Not Junk
button in the toolbar.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ Run Junk Mail Controls.

The above is all you need to know about using SpamSieve with Thunderbird. The
Customization section explains some more advanced setup options.

Click the Install button in the window that just opened.
Thunderbird will ask you to select a file.

Click on Desktop, select the SpamSieveThunderbirdPlug-In.xpi file, and click Open.

Click the Install now button.

Quit Thunderbird and re-launch it. If you now go to the Tools
menu and choose Extensions you should see the SpamSieve
Thunderbird Plug-In listed there. Next to it will be the version
of the plug-in. The current plug-in version is always listed at the
bottom of SpamSieve’s about box. You can now delete the SpamSieveThunderbirdPlug-In.xpi file from your desktop.

Choose Junk Mail Controls from the Tools menu. You can now
configure the junk filtering settings for your different accounts.
On the Settings tab, make sure that:

Trust junk mail headers set by is unchecked.

Move incoming messages determined to be junk mail to
is checked.

When I manually mark messages as junk is checked.

When displaying HTML messages marked as junk, sanitize
the HTML is checked.

On the Adaptive Filter tab, make sure that Enable adaptive
junk mail detection is checked.

Now proceed to the Do an Initial Training section. To train
SpamSieve with spam messages, select one or more of them and then
choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ As Junk or click the Junk button in
the toolbar. To train SpamSieve with good messages, select one or
more of them and then choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ As Not Junk or
click the Not Junk button in the toolbar.

SpamSieve will process new mail automatically. If you ever need to manually ask
it to sift through a mix of spam and good messages, select the messages and
choose Message ‣ Mark ‣ Run Junk Mail Controls.

SpamSieve is a trademark of C-Command Software, LLC. Mac is a registered
trademark of Apple Computer. All other products mentioned are trademarks
of their respective owners.

End User License Agreement

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NOT AGREE TO THIS LICENSE, THEN DO NOT DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL THE PROGRAM, AND
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Title

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copy the Documentation,

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Components

The following open-source components are used in SpamSieve:

Regular expression support is provided by the PCRE library package, which is open
source software, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright by
the University of Cambridge, England.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
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SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Thanks to Allan Odgaard for some code snippets that are used
in the Software Update installer.

Worked around a bug in Microsoft Outlook 15.36 were it could
incorrectly report that no messages were selected, thus preventing
training from working.

The Apple Mail - Remote Training
script now sets and clears message background colors and
(optionally) flags. This way if a server filter and SpamSieve share
the same Spam mailbox, you can easily see which messages are
confirmed as spam by SpamSieve because they will be marked in its
normal way.

SpamSieve now tells Apple Mail’s junk filter when incoming messages
are not junk (instead of only when they are junk). This should
help prevent the confusing behavior of Mail displaying good messages
in gold/brown text if its filter (or a server filter) disagreed with
SpamSieve. Reminder: You can also have SpamSieve override the message
text color by enabling AppleMailAllJunkMessagesUseBlackText in
the esoteric preferences.

SpamSieve now uses the new os_log subsystem on macOS 10.12.

Adjusted the sizes of the Dock icon status indicators to work around
a font change in macOS 10.12.

The version number of the Apple Mail plug-in is now synchronized with
the version number of SpamSieve itself to reduce confusion for those
using Mail Plugin Manager.

SpamSieve now uses a different and more reliable strategy to prevent
the OS from keeping it stuck in a partially launched state.

Added an experimental option for Apple Mail to use black text for
messages marked as junk but not processed by SpamSieve, overriding
the low-contrast color that Mail added in Mac OS X 10.11. For
SpamSieve’s black text, click here;
for the default brown text click here.

Modernized the Software Update code that checks whether your OS
version is new enough to run the new version of SpamSieve.

The SpamSieveHelper application will now quit in the rare event that
another copy is already running.

Made some changes to try to work around a rare bug where SpamSieve’s
Apple Mail plug-in didn’t load until after the first few messages had
been downloaded from the server, leading to them being filtered
directly to the Spam mailbox rather than through SpamSieve.

Worked around an issue where an internal path conversion error from
NSFileManager could cause SpamSieve to interrupt spam filtering
with an error dialog. Now SpamSieve will simply log an “Error looking
up image for address” message to the Console and continue filtering.

Made a variety of changes to work around a bug in Mac OS X 10.11 in
which (in rares cases) the system would start to launch SpamSieve but
not load any of its code, leaving it stuck in a partially launched
state. This would particularly happen if Mail itself was
auto-launched by the system after your Mac booted. This could lead to
Apple Mail hanging (while waiting for SpamSieve), spam messages left
in the inbox (because the Mail plug-in was forced to assume they were
good), and high Mail memory use. SpamSieve’s launch agent now tries
to detect this situation and quit the stuck SpamSieve process,
allowing it to relaunch normally. If this is unsuccessful, the Mail
plug-in will report an error explaining what is going on and how you
can manually fix it.

The Apple Mail - Server Junk Mailbox
script can now move the spams to per-account spam mailboxes, has
better error reporting, and has an option to enable debug logging.

If SpamSieve detects that training a message didn’t work because of
an AppleScript bug in Mac OS X 10.11, it will now direct you to the
new Duplicate Apple Mail Accounts section of the manual for a
workaround.

When filtering incoming messages, Apple Mail will now wait longer for
SpamSieve to launch in case the system delayed respawning the launch
agent. Thus, spam messages are more likely to be filtered rather than
left in the inbox.

If the launch agent is set to be continuously running, it no longer
quits itself when Mail quits or SpamSieve quits/crashes. This should
help ensure that Mail is able to relaunch SpamSieve right away,
without Mac OS X 10.11 throttling the launch agent.

The Apple Mail - Discard Spam
script now has an option to set the retry delay to work around a
problem with spam messages being left in the trash if Mail failed to
delete them.

Microsoft Outlook 2016 removes the Run AppleScript rule
action feature. This makes it impossible to create a rule that
automatically processes incoming messages with SpamSieve. We
recommend using the “send-a-smile” button in Outlook’s main
window (below the search field) to send Microsoft feedback,
asking them to prioritize this feature. Please
see this forum post
for more information and workarounds for using SpamSieve with Outlook 2016.

When SpamSieve encounters a permissions error, it now reports on any
applicable ACLs (Access Control Lists).

Improved the error message when your version of SpamSieve is too old
for the current version of Mac OS X.

Added “(?)” to error text to help people know what “Help
button” refers to.

If a PDF file attached to an e-mail triggers an OS bug that leads to
an infinite loop, SpamSieve now aborts the spamsieve-reader
process after 30 seconds. Previously, the process (and your fan)
would keep running forever and possibly freeze the mail client.

Worked around a bug in Mac OS X 10.11 that could cause a crash during
Software Update….

Worked around a bug in Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 that could cause a
crash.

Added defensive coding to try to prevent a crash when saving the
corpus to disk.

Fixed a regression that could cause an error when switching
applications.

Fixed a regression where SpamSieve wasn’t able to reset the corpus.

Fixed a regression where the Entourage scripts could not be
installed.

Fixed a bug where Software Update… would continue offering updates
in the same session in which you had held down the Option key.

Fixed a bug where SpamSieve could crash when sending data to a helper
tool that exited unexpectedly.

Fixed a bug where a text field in the crash reporter was truncated.

Fixed a few small memory leaks.

Updated the German localization.

2.9.20—June 3, 2015

General

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

Apple’s server-side iCloud spam filter has recently become more
aggressive. As a result, many people have been confused by the sudden
increase in messages in the Junk mailbox (rather than SpamSieve’s
Spam mailbox). iCloud’s spam filter cannot be turned off, but the
Why does the “Junk” mailbox appear in Apple Mail? section of the
manual and the new Consolidating Spam From Multiple Filters
section explain some of the options for dealing with this.

SpamSieve’s launch agent process no longer runs when Apple Mail is
not running, which should reduce overall memory use.

Dates in the log are now shown in the local time zone.

Trained entries in the log now include the sender’s address.

The Apple Mail plug-in installer now checks that file ownership is
enabled on the volume containing your home folder. This is necessary
for proper operation of SpamSieve’s launch agent and, thus, launching
and training from Apple Mail.

When the trial period is over, the alert now has a Help button
that opens the instructions for uninstalling.

SpamSieve will now recreate the log file’s folder if it
unexpectedly disappears after the application has launched,
perhaps due to CleanApp. If this affects you, SpamSieve will make
a note in the Console log.

Improved SpamSieve’s error handling and recovery when there is an
error creating or updating the log file.

The Uninstall Apple Mail Plug-In… command will now retry if
there’s an error communicating with Mail and report a better
error if it still doesn’t succeed.

When training from Apple Mail, SpamSieve will now report a better
error if it detects that the necessary SpamSieveHelper
application is not running.

If SpamSieve detects that one of its files is missing, i.e. that
the application is damaged, it now presents a better error
message.

When there is an error reading the corpus or history database,
the error alert now has a clickable Help button instead of inline
URL text.

The Entourage scripts can now log errors to Console.

SpamSieve will now log an error if it’s not installed in the
Applications folder, as this can prevent proper functioning with
Airmail (due to sandbox restrictions).

Improved the error message if Apple Mail can’t launch SpamSieve.

Errors for corrupt files now link to the relevant Web pages that
explain how to fix them.

Improved the error message when you’re using a version of SpamSieve
that’s too old for your version of Apple Mail.

Improved error reporting when a temporary folder cannot be
created.

Improved the error message for incorrect serial numbers.

SpamSieve now reports permissions information if there’s an error
opening the statistics database.

Bug Fixes

Worked around a bug where Microsoft Outlook does not always
correctly return a message’s source. This could lead to spam
messages being classified as good because SpamSieve had no
information to work from. To get this fix, choose Install
Outlook Scripts from the SpamSieve menu.

Worked around a text conversion bug in Mac OS X 10.10.3.

SpamSieve will no longer repeatedly try to fix a file’s owner if
ownership is ignored on the volume.

Fixed a bug where SpamSieve could report an internal error if it
received an Apple event while in the process of quitting.

Fixed a bug that could cause an internal error writing to
SpamSieve’s log file when the application was quitting.

You can wait to update Mac OS X until a new version of SpamSieve
has been released. The latest compatibility information is always
available at the top of the SpamSieve Support page. To prevent Mac
OS X from updating itself without asking you, go to the App
Store section of System Preferences and make sure that
Install OS X updates is unchecked.

You can sign up to receive the public beta versions of
SpamSieve. Then you will likely already have a compatible version
of SpamSieve installed when the OS update first becomes available.

SpamSieve is now more aggressive about auto-training whitelist
rules to prevent false positives.

SpamSieve is now 33% faster at reading the corpus and 48% faster at
writing it. This improves the launch time and overall application
responsiveness.

The Apple Mail Train as Good command is better at determining
when a message is inside of a junk mailbox with a localized name.

The Apple Mail - Remote Training
script no longer times out when there are lots of messages in the
training mailbox. It also has new options for changing the name of
the spam mailbox and for enabling debug logging.

Added the ShowResetAlert user default to show the corpus/history
reset window if the user can’t hold down the proper modifier keys.

Added QuitMailWhenMacSleeps to the esoteric preferences. This
quits Mail when the Mac sleeps and relaunches it when the Mac wakes.
This works around an OS bug that can cause messages not to be moved
to the Spam mailbox if Mail received them right after the Mac
woke from sleep.

Worked around a string encoding bug in Mac OS X 10.10.

Fixed a bug where the Apple Mail plug-in would cause unnecessary
messages about LSUIElement and the sandbox to be logged to
Console.

Fixed a bug where a change in system font metrics caused some
text in the Preferences and Statistics windows to be
truncated.

Added defensive check to prevent trying to fix the ownership of
certain folders.

Fixed a bug where toolbar buttons in the rules and corpus windows
were always enabled when running on Mac OS X 10.10.

Worked around an OS bug that prevented bookmark files from being
resolved.

Worked around an OS bug that could cause SpamSieve’s log file to
be created in the wrong location.

Updated the German and Spanish localizations.

2.9.18—November 17, 2014

Works with Apple Mail under Mac OS X 10.10.1. It’s easiest if you
update to SpamSieve 2.9.18 before updating to Mac OS X 10.10.1.
(To prevent Mac OS X from updating itself without asking you, go
to the App Store section of System Preferences and make sure
that Install OS X updates is unchecked.) In any case, if you
don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s Message menu, be
sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the SpamSieve
menu. Otherwise, with the SpamSieve plug-in not installed, Mail
will move good messages to the spam mailbox without consulting
SpamSieve.

Works with Apple Mail under Mac OS X 10.9.4. It’s easiest if you update
to SpamSieve 2.9.15 before updating to Mac OS X 10.9.4. In any case,
if you don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s Message
menu, be sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the
SpamSieve menu. Otherwise, with the SpamSieve plug-in not
installed, Mail will move good messages to the spam mailbox
without consulting SpamSieve.

Works with Apple Mail under Mac OS X 10.9.3. It’s easiest if you update
to SpamSieve 2.9.14 before updating to Mac OS X 10.9.3. In any case,
if you don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s Message
menu, be sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the
SpamSieve menu. Otherwise, with the SpamSieve plug-in not
installed, Mail will move good messages to the spam mailbox
without consulting SpamSieve.

If an error occurs during Install Outlook Scripts, SpamSieve will
now try to determine whether this was because Microsoft Outlook was
not installed properly.

If your copy of Apple Mail is damaged, SpamSieve will now report
this, but it will still let you install the plug-in.

The training commands in Apple Mail work better with localized
mailbox names.

Added more logging for the Outlook Train as Good command.

The images in the PDF manual and Apple Help are now
Retina-resolution.

Adjusted the font sizes in the PDF manual.

2.9.13—February 25, 2014

Works with Apple Mail under Mac OS X 10.9.2. It’s easiest if you
update to SpamSieve 2.9.13 before updating to Mac OS X 10.9.2. In any
case, if you don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s
Message menu, be sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In
from the SpamSieve menu. Otherwise, with the SpamSieve plug-in
not installed, Mail will move good messages to the spam mailbox
without consulting SpamSieve.

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

On Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple Mail is slower at moving messages
to the Spam mailbox when you choose SpamSieve - Train as Spam
and the inbox when you choose SpamSieve - Train as Good. This
version of SpamSieve includes some changes to speed this up. It also
includes workarounds to move messages faster by using GUI scripting
instead of regular AppleScript. To enable the workarounds, please see
the AppleMailTrainSpamGUIScripting and
AppleMailTrainGoodGUIScripting options in the Esoteric
Preferences section of the manual.

Documented the AppleMailPlugInSetIsJunk esoteric preference, as
it can be used to speed up filtering on Mac OS X 10.9.

Improved the Setting Up Airmail section of the manual to recommend
not deleting messages from the Spam mailbox when using Airmail
1.3.1 (223).

SpamSieve is now able to log more diagnostic information to help
track down problems with Apple Mail.

When a Mac OS X update disables SpamSieve’s Apple Mail plug-in, and
your Mac is running in a language other than English, SpamSieve is
better able to detect this and auto-reinstall the plug-in.

SpamSieve now cleans up empty folders of disabled Apple Mail bundles.

When training messages from Microsoft Outlook, SpamSieve now logs
errors to the Console. You can also enable extended error logging via
the OutlookScriptDebug default.

2.9.12—December 16, 2013

Works with Apple Mail under Mac OS X 10.9.1. It’s easiest if you
update to SpamSieve 2.9.12 before updating to Mac OS X 10.9.1. In any
case, if you don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s
Message menu, be sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In
from the SpamSieve menu. Otherwise, with the SpamSieve plug-in
not installed, Mail will move good messages to the spam mailbox

On Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple Mail is slower at moving messages
to the Spam mailbox when you choose SpamSieve - Train as
Spam. SpamSieve includes a workaround to move messages faster by
using GUI scripting instead of regular AppleScript. To enable the
workaround, please see the AppleMailTrainSpamGUIScripting option
in the Esoteric Preferences section of the manual.

Versions 1.2.1 and later of the Airmail
e-mail client include support for SpamSieve. The Setting Up Airmail
section of the manual describes how to use SpamSieve with Airmail.

You can now hold down the Option key when you click Check Now in the
Software Update… window to always download the latest version,
even if your version is already up-to-date. This is an easy way to
download and re-install a fresh copy of SpamSieve if yours is
damaged.

Added some defensive coding to protect against a bug in
_NSDispatchData that could cause a crash on Mavericks.

Made various updates and improvements to the manual.

2.9.10—October 22, 2013

SpamSieve is now compatible with the updated GM build of Mac OS X
10.9 Mavericks. It is recommended that you update to SpamSieve 2.9.10
before installing Mavericks. If you’ve updated to Mavericks first,
and you don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s Message
menu, be sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the
SpamSieve menu.

Tried to work around a problem where the Outlook installer received
an error from the system when the Mac was running in French.

2.9.9—October 7, 2013

SpamSieve is now compatible with the GM build of Mac OS X 10.9
Mavericks. It is recommended that you update to SpamSieve 2.9.9
before installing Mavericks. If you’ve updated to Mavericks first,
and you don’t see the SpamSieve commands in Apple Mail’s Message
menu, be sure to choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the
SpamSieve menu.

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

Microsoft Outlook 2011’s notification sounds are now available in
SpamSieve’s Notification preferences.

Added the Apple Mail - Server Junk Mailbox
script. When it’s not possible to turn off
a server-side junk filter (e.g. iCloud’s), this lets SpamSieve save you
from mistakes that the server junk filter made by moving any messages
that SpamSieve thinks are good back to the inbox. It will also
consolidate the spam messages from all the accounts into a single spam
mailbox (the same one where SpamSieve is already putting your spam).

Can now repair the ownership and permissions of the SpamSieve and
Apple Mail preferences files if needed. This fixes problems where
SpamSieve would lose its registration information or Apple Mail
wouldn’t show the SpamSieve menu commands.

Fixed some problems where the Open Window command in Apple Mail
was not available or did not always open the specified window.

2.9.8—September 12, 2013

SpamSieve is now compatible with Mac OS X 10.8.5.

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

The Train as Good command in Apple Mail now considers the
message’s CC recipients when determining the proper account inbox.

The installer is better at working around incorrect Apple Mail folder
permissions.

Automatic software updates no longer fail if Hazel is set to move files in the
Downloads folder.

The Help menu now includes direct links to important sections of
the manual.

Removed unused code from the Apple Mail plug-in.

2.9.7—May 1, 2013

Improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Mac OS X.

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

SpamSieve no longer links against AppleScriptKit. This removes some GUI
scripting functionality (which is now largely available by other means)
but works around an OS bug that could prevent SpamSieve from launching.

Worked around a bug in Apple Mail’s iCloud rule syncing.

SpamSieve is better at moving trained messages when Outlook has lost
track of the special Junk E-mail folder.

Fixed a problem where Apple Mail couldn’t communicate with SpamSieve when
the file permissions were incorrect.

Fixed a bug where SpamSieve couldn’t load any addresses from Outlook if
it reported an error while getting the e-mail address of a contact.

Added more checks that the folders SpamSieve relies upon have the proper
permissions.

Improved error reporting for Apple Mail, Growl, and more.

Improved handling of file permissions errors.

The Apple Mail drone script now sets the junk status.

Wrote a script that
allows SpamSieve to filter messages (in Apple Mail) that have been
organized by SaneBox.

Improved the Japanese localization.

SpamSieve now requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

2.9.6—December 19, 2012

Worked around a bug in Mac OS
X 10.8.2 that could cause spam operations in Postbox to be very slow. If you’re using
Postbox, you can update your SpamSieve plug-in by following steps 1
through 6 in the Setting Up Postbox section of the manual.

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

SpamSieve now understands that @icloud.com, @me.com, and
@mac.com are equivalent, so it’s better at finding the proper
inbox in Apple Mail when you train a message as good. (For non-Apple
IMAP and POP mail accounts, you can define aliases manually, as
before. Go to the Accounts tab of Mail’s preferences and enter
all the addresses—separated by commas—in the Email Address field.)

Customers have reported that Sync Services does not work reliably on
Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Thus, rather than having Outlook use
Sync Services to sync its contacts with the system address book,
SpamSieve now offers a feature to load the Outlook address book
directly. (This ensures that SpamSieve doesn’t mark messages from
people in your address book as spam.) Outlook users are encouraged to
make sure that Use Entourage/Outlook address book is checked in
SpamSieve’s preferences and to click the Load button. For more
information, see the Use Entourage/Outlook address book section of
the manual.

SpamSieve is now better able to handle invalid data received from a
mail program.

When Using a Spam Mailbox on the Server, SpamSieve is better at
handling errors from Mail that could cause a trained spam message to
go to the local spam mailbox instead.

Worked around various file permissions problems that could prevent
training in Apple Mail from working.

Worked around a bug in Migration Assistant that could prevent
SpamSieve from working properly with Apple Mail.

The plug-in and scripts installers are better able to handle
non-standard folder structures.

Fixed a bug where SpamSieve was unable to see the contents of certain
malformed messages, leading to poor filtering accuracy.

Fixed a bug where sometimes setting the date in the Statistics
window didn’t work when SpamSieve was running in 64-bit mode.

Fixed a regression where where messages trained as good in Apple Mail
didn’t move back to the inbox if you were using a local spam mailbox
and no inbox matched the message’s recipients.

Made various improvements to the manual.

2.9.5—September 21, 2012

Updated the Apple Mail plug-in to work with Security Update 2012-004
(Snow Leopard) for Mac OS X
10.6.8. If, after installing this update, you don’t see the SpamSieve
commands in Mail’s Message menu, it may be necessary to go to the
SpamSieve menu and choose Install Apple Mail Plug-In.

The AppleScripts for controlling the Griffin PowerMate seem to trigger a
crashing bug in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Thus, SpamSieve’s Flash PowerMate
option has been turned off. You can try re-enabling it in the preferences if
desired.

When training a message as good from Apple Mail, SpamSieve is better
at figuring out which account it came from.

Worked around problems on some Macs that could prevent SpamSieve from
receiving training commands from Apple Mail on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Fixed a problem where SpamSieve could crash when processing messages
from Apple Mail on OS X 10.8, particularly after the Mac had awakened from
sleep.

Worked around an issue on OS X 10.8 that could cause training SpamSieve
from Apple Mail to be very slow.

The Train as Good command in Outlook will now move messages from the
trash back to the inbox.

Made various updates to the manual for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, for
example clarifying that SpamSieve works (via Apple Mail) during a Power
Nap.

Worked around a problem where Apple Mail couldn’t communicate with
SpamSieve if the /etc/hosts file was damaged.

Improved the error reporting when SpamSieve detects that one of its
files is damaged.

Added defensive coding to try to track down a notification icon problem
when running in French.

You can now set the MJTSoundLoadFromApps default to false if you
want to prevent SpamSieve from looking for notification sounds installed
by other applications, e.g. to prevent mounting an encrypted MicrosoftUserData folder.

Fixed a bug handling errors if a software update failed; if it
succeeded, the .dmg file is now deleted to reduce clutter.

After purchasing, SpamSieve used to show your user image to indicate
that it had been successfully personalized. It now shows a generic
checkmark to avoid prompting you for Contacts access on OS X 10.8.

Added an icon for the crash reporter, since it’s now displayed under OS
X 10.8.

If the Apple Mail plug-in cannot be installed due to a folder ownership
problem, SpamSieve will now ask for an administrator password to try to
fix the folder for you.

Reverted to version 1.2.3 of the Growl SDK to avoid problems with high
CPU usage, internal errors, and crashes.

Improved SpamSieve’s reporting of unexpected errors as well as script
errors from Apple Mail.

SpamSieve no longer responds at all to certain invalid commands. This
should work around an OS bug that could lead to crashes.

The crash reporter can now make recommendations for you based on the
contents of the crash log.

Added a link to the forum in the Help menu.

2.9.1—April 26, 2012

Added support for Microsoft Outlook 2011 SP2 (a.k.a. 14.2.x). If
SpamSieve can detect that you were using Outlook 2011 before, and that
SP2 has been installed, SpamSieve will auto-update its scripts
automatically. Otherwise, you can choose Install Outlook Scripts from
the SpamSieve menu. Either way, the SpamSieve rules in Outlook will
continue to work without modification.

SpamSieve now tries to detect whether its Apple Mail plug-in is damaged
and auto-heal the installed copy if necessary.

If there’s an error updating SpamSieve’s Apple Mail plug-in, it now
reports more information to try to diagnose the problem.

If the Apple Mail plug-in detects that it’s damaged, it will alert the
user to download and install a fresh copy.

SpamSieve now checksums the Outlook script files (both the installed and
built-in copies) to detect whether they are damaged.

Made a change to eliminate a particular cause of false positives for some
users.

When training an Exchange message as good in Apple Mail, SpamSieve is
better at moving it to the proper inbox.

Processing incoming messages with Outlook is more efficient. To take
advantage of this change, choose Install Outlook Scripts from the
SpamSieve menu.

If you’ve used the SpamSieve - Change Settings command in Apple Mail
to tell SpamSieve not to use a local spam mailbox, training a message as
spam will now try to move the message to a spam mailbox on the same
server account, rather than always using the first account.

Added support for training messages as spam via Herald (version 2.1.2 and
later), a notification plug-in for Apple Mail.

The score script command has a new autotraining parameter that
can be used to override the setting in the preferences on a
case-by-case basis. This might be useful, for example, if you’re writing
an AppleScript to triage messages that have already been classified, and
you just want to get SpamSieve’s opinion without having to make any
corrections.

SpamSieve now runs as a 64-bit application on Mac OS X 10.7
Lion. This allows for faster launch times and reduced overall
system memory use if you are running exclusively 64-bit
applications. It also prevents problems caused by buggy input
manager haxies. You can use the Finder’s Get Info window to
set SpamSieve to run in 32-bit mode if you want to play classic
Mac OS notification sounds or to reduce the memory use of
SpamSieve itself.

When training an Apple Mail message in the Spam mailbox as
good, SpamSieve is now better able to match it up with the
proper inbox.

Offloaded more PDF processing to the helper tool so that
SpamSieve itself doesn’t crash if you receive a message with a
corrupt PDF attachment.

Made the Apple Mail plug-in installer more robust and better at
reporting errors.

An error finding the built-in copy of SpamSieve’s Eudora plug-in
will no longer prevent SpamSieve from launching, unless it
actually needs to install the plug-in.

Entourage is supposed to create the EntourageScriptMenuItems folder, but for extra robustness SpamSieve will now
create it if it’s missing.

If SpamSieve’s PDF reader detects that the CTLoader input
manager is loaded, it now logs a warning that this may cause
SpamSieve to hang.

Tried to work around an unconfirmed issue that could prevent
SpamSieve from processing the first few Apple Mail messages on
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

Adjusted the packaging of the disk image and the installation
instructions.

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when parsing messages with
an invalid Date header.

Fixed a regression where SpamSieve would sometimes bring up an
alert sheet to report that you already had the latest version.

Fixed a crash in the software updater.

2.8.1—March 24, 2010

Fixed a regression in the SQLite build that could cause
SpamSieve to crash when running on a PowerPC-based Mac.

2.8—March 24, 2010

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

Adjusted the SpamSieve - Train as Good command in Apple Mail
to reduce confusion. Training a message as good now will only
move the message into the inbox of an enabled account. If no
account matches the message or if the proper account is
disabled, it will move the message into the inbox of the first
enabled account (even if it doesn’t match). Thus, the message
will always move out of the Spam mailbox, and it will no
longer seem to disappear because it was moved into an inbox that
was hidden.

Made various code modernizations.

Apple Mail now auto-launches SpamSieve sooner, to speed up the
filtering of the first messages.

Fixed a bug where, in rare circumstances, SpamSieve didn’t
filter all of the first batch of messages when using Apple Mail
on Mac OS X 10.6.

SpamSieve will now warn you if it looks like its Apple Mail
plug-in has been damaged by an application slimming utility.
This could lead to Mail continually reporting that the plug-in
was incompatible.

SpamSieve will now complain if it looks like you’ve manually
installed the Apple Mail plug-in in the wrong folder instead of
using SpamSieve’s installer.

Made a change to try to work around a bug in Apple Mail that
could make training a message as good create a duplicate copy of
the message.

Improved the Purchase window to reduce confusion about the
demo period, serial numbers, and the number of seats that you’ve
purchased.

Modernized the Software Update window and code.

Changed the way the Software Update feature finds the
downloads folder on Mac OS X 10.5 and later because sometimes
the one that Internet Config returned would be invalid or
unwanted.

Fixed a bug where SpamSieve would crash when processing certain
invalid URLs.

Fixed an error where a newly added whitelist/blocklist rule
might not be auto-selected.

Removed the Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese localizations because
they were out of date. If you would like to update the
translation for one of these languages, please contact
spamsieve@c-command.com.

2.7.7—October 20, 2009

Improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Mac OS X.

Made some changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

Fixed a bug where the “Train as Good” command in Apple Mail
didn’t move Exchange messages back to the inbox.

SpamSieve is better able to recover from corpus files that were
damaged due to disk errors.

Improved the Entourage installer’s error handling.

Improved the error reporting when saving the corpus.

Improved the troubleshooting instructions.

Fixed a problem where messages trained as good in Apple Mail
could be moved into the inbox of a disabled account.

Fixed a bug that could cause harmless error messages to be
logged to the Console when playing System 7 sound files.

The crash reporter now warns before sending a report without an
e-mail address.

You can now press Enter to click the Send Report button in
the crash reporter.

2.7.3—January 26, 2009

Rewrote and restructured the manual to make the setup and
troubleshooting instructions clearer.

Replaced the Training Tip window with an alert that’s
displayed when SpamSieve’s corpus is empty. This goes along with
the more explicit guidance that ongoing training is only
necessary to correct mistakes.

The Entourage installer no longer asks before replacing existing
script files. If you want to customize the scripts (rare these days,
since there are so many built-in configuration options), you should use
copies with different names to avoid having SpamSieve overwrite them.

Improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Mac OS X
10.6 (Snow Leopard). There are now two separate versions of
SpamSieve’s Apple Mail plug-in. Version 1.3 is for Mac OS X
10.4; version 1.4 is for Mac OS X 10.5 and later. SpamSieve will
auto-choose which one to install (or update) based on the
version of Mac OS X that you’re running.

Worked around a problem where the Edit Log command would try
to open SpamSieve’s log using Script Editor if Launch Services
was confused.

Rewrote filesystem code to improve performance and error
reporting.

If there’s an error getting the downloads folder for a software
update, SpamSieve now defaults to Downloads rather than
Desktop.

Worked around a problem where training (using Apple Mail on Mac
OS X 10.5) could be interrupted.

Added Korean localization.

Moved .nib files that don’t need localization out of the
English.lproj folder. This should make it easier to run
SpamSieve in a language other than English without changing the
default language on your Mac.

Fixed bug where the Software Update… checker didn’t
always re-check for new updates.

Restored progress bar when loading Entourage addresses.

Updated the localizations.

Improved the documentation.

Fixed help book icon.

2.6.2—May 4, 2007

Made changes to prevent a crash on Mac OS X 10.4.9 when
quitting in response to a mail program quitting.

Slight changes for better accuracy.

Fixed regression where the Import Addresses… command
didn’t always work for text files in the default encoding.

Blocklist and whitelist rules that use Body (any text
part) can now match text from the headers of bounced messages
(which e-mail clients often display as part of the message body).

The Software Update… feature now checks whether the
updated version can run on your installed version of Mac OS
X.

Better logging of messages that don’t have a sender.

Fixed a threading bug.

Made an optimization to the Apple Mail plug-in.

Adjusted the setup instructions for Apple Mail to avoid
problem with the Previous Recipients list.

Modernized the crash reporter code.

Updated the French and German localizations.

2.6.1—April 9, 2007

Fixed regression where SpamSieve wouldn’t launch if you had
a large number of Mac OS 9 sound files.

Fixed bug where Thunderbird messages that were manually
marked as junk weren’t moved to the junk folder. If you are
using Thunderbird, first update to SpamSieve 2.6.1, then
choose Install Thunderbird Plug-In from the
SpamSieve menu to update the plug-in.

Made change prevent crash on Mac OS X 10.4.9 when quitting
in response to a mail program quitting.

2.6—March 19, 2007

SpamSieve now works with Mozilla Thunderbird.

Improved detection of image spams and phishing messages.

Made various message analysis improvements to increase the
accuracy of the Bayesian filter.

AppleScripting the whitelist and blocklist is much more
efficient for scripts that access a lot of rules.

When installing a plug-in for a mail program, SpamSieve now
opens the relevant page of the Apple Help to help you
complete the installation.

The alert when SpamSieve has auto-updated its Apple Mail
plug-in is now non-modal, so it doesn’t interfere with spam
filtering.

The Software Update… checker now works behind an HTTP
proxy, and the auto-updater is now compatible with FileVault.

Can now import addresses from the incorrectly encoded
.vcf files that are generated by recent versions of
Address Book.

Growl notifications are now enabled by default.

The Apple Mail plug-in is more robust.

Fixed some small memory leaks.

Made some performance optimizations to the message tokenizer.

SpamSieve is more robust when processing incomplete messages.

The Entourage “Train Good” command now moves messages out of
the Uncertain Spam folder.

The Apple Mail “Train as Good” command now moves messages
out of zSpam mailboxes.

Updated to PCRE 7.0.

2.5—October 30, 2006

Made lots of changes to the parser and classifiers to
improve accuracy, especially for HTML and image messages.

The in-memory corpus representation is much more efficient,
which should lead to lower memory use and greater speed.

Rewrote the Software Update… feature. When a new version is
available, it can now show you the release notes. SpamSieve now
downloads the new version itself, rather than relying on your
browser. On 10.3 and later, the Download & Install button
will cause SpamSieve to auto-update itself to the latest
version.

Improved accuracy on messages containing misspelled words.

Now requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later.

Auto-training now places a higher priority on corpus balance
compared to learning from novel messages.

Improved the Apple Mail plug-in’s Train as Good script to
work around a bug in Mail.

Improved the reliability of the Apple Mail training commands.

Made further changes to improve the success rate of the Apple
Mail plug-in installer.

Updated to PCRE 6.7.

Entourage training progress messages no longer block if
Entourage is in the background.

Worked around OS bug that prevented the Statistics sheet
from properly parsing dates when the user’s date format
started with a two-digit year.

No longer quits with an internal error if the mydefaults
tool can’t be installed.

Added keyboard shortcut for Hide Others.

Fixed bug with Purchase window sheet.

Removed some old, unused code.

Updated the toolbar icons.

Various localization and documentation improvements.

Fixed bug with display of remaining demo time.

The Entourage script installer is more robust when contacting
Entourage via AppleScript fails.

Improved compatibility with Leopard.

The date in the Statistics window more closely matches the
user’s preferences (10.4 and later).

Better at detecting damaged corpus files (instead of crashing).

Fixed bug where Uncertain Spam growls were always sent, even if
disabled in SpamSieve’s preferences.

Adjusted workaround for Help Viewer bug.

Increased the maximum width of the Hits column in rule list
windows.

Added thousands separators throughout the Statistics, Corpus,
and rules windows.

Fixed bug where adding a rule didn’t create a new rule if there
was already a rule with a blank “Text to Match.”

Fixed rare crashing bug when performing operations during
idle time.

Removed the Import Messages command (which let you train
SpamSieve directly from a file in mbox format), because there
are now very few situations where it is useful, and it was
confusing people.

The following strings may now be used in rules to match headers
that are missing: <SpamSieve-Unknown-Subject>,
<SpamSieve-Unknown-From>, <SpamSieve-Unknown-FromName>,
<SpamSieve-Unknown-To>. It is somewhat common for messages
to have a blank subject (which can be matched using the empty
string), but legitimate messages that omit the Subject for From
header are rare, and now these can easily be matched by creating
the appropriate rules on the blocklist.

Removed the delay, when using Apple Mail on Tiger, between
choosing “Train as Good” or “Train as Spam” and when training
actually started.

The Entourage scripts now report progress part way through bulk
trainings and allow you to cancel. They also warn if it looks
like you’re training SpamSieve with too many messages, and
they’re better at preventing duplicate categories from being
created in Entourage. The “Train Spam” script now removes the
spam messages from the server.

Growl notifications from people in the address book now
include the “To” address for mailing list messages. This makes
it easier to decide whether to ignore the notification.

Fixed bug that caused part of SpamSieve’s corpus to be written
to disk incorrectly when running on Intel. In most cases, no ill
effects would have been observed, and SpamSieve will repair the
corpus file the first time you launch 2.4.3.

Improved the error messages.

Improved the display of the demo time remaining.

Updated the localizations.

2.4.2—February 23, 2006

SpamSieve is now much better at catching a new type of spam
message that previous versions had been inconsistent at
catching.

Worked around some more spammer tricks to improve accuracy.

Improved the way message attachments are analyzed.

Fixed bug that could cause improper analysis of messages from
Apple Mail or Eudora, leading to reduced accuracy.

Improved phish detection.

Improved the performance of the Apple Mail training commands on
Tiger and Jaguar.

Made some changes to the way spam messages are colored in Apple
Mail. Now, the most spammy color (blue) is reserved for messages
with scores 99 or higher, i.e. messages that matched a blocklist
rule, had encoded HTML parts, or were known to definitely be
spam.

The Show Window command in Apple Mail can now open the
SpamSieve help.

Under certain circumstances, SpamSieve can now detect at launch
whether the application package is damaged, rather than
too-quietly reporting errors in the log during message
processing.

Made various changes to SpamSieve’s tokenizer and HTML parser to
improve accuracy.

Improved filtering of messages containing attachments.

Added Apple Mail settings to control whether messages trained as
spam are marked as read and/or left on the server.

Better at finding notification sounds that are built into mail
clients.

Now shows uncertain growls when notification is suppressed.

SpamSieve now delegates more file reveal operations to Path
Finder 4, since it fixes a bug in Path Finder 3 that prevented
certain reveals from working.

Rather than typing (or copying and pasting) your name and serial
number to personalize SpamSieve, you can now click the
x-spamsieve:// URL that’s sent to you when you purchase SpamSieve or get a serial
number reminder.

Fixed bug where the rules list would scroll one rule up if it
was scrolled to the bottom and you edited a rule.

Apple Mail messages can now be filed into different mailboxes
based on how spammy they are (requires 10.3 or 10.4).

The Apple Mail plug-in is now a Universal Binary, so SpamSieve
can be used on Intel-based Macs without running Mail in Rosetta.

Added support for the new (non-haiku) Habeas headers.

SpamSieve now plays notification sounds using the alert volume
rather than the master volume, and they’ll be played on the same
output device as alerts and sound effects. (The old behavior is
still in effect when playing classic sound files and when running on
Jaguar.)

Added suppressingnotification AppleScript parameter. You
can use this to prevent SpamSieve from bouncing its Dock icon or
showing Growls when recalculating the spam scores of old
messages.

The Software Update alert is now a sheet, so it won’t interfere
with spam filtering.

If Path Finder is running, it will be used instead of the Finder
to reveal files/folders.

Made various tweaks to keep PowerMates from flashing when they
shouldn’t.

Adjusted the standard set of rules.

You can now tab back and forth between the search field and
table in the corpus and rules windows (requires 10.4).

Predicted entries in the log now show the message’s sender.

Added preference to control whether Apple Mail false positives
are marked as unread.

SpamSieve now avoids loading the address book except when
absolutely necessary. Thus, if your address book is corrupted
such that loading it would cause a crash, you’ll still be able
to receive mail if you turn off SpamSieve’s address book–related
features.

Messages with empty senders are no longer considered to be from
people in the address book, even if the address book contains a
contact with such an address.

Fixed longstanding bug in which sorting the blocklist or whitelist
by Header or Match Style would group the rules
appropriately, but wouldn’t order the groups alphabetically by the
localized text in the column.

Improved the error messages in the application and in the Apple
Mail plug-in.

Made a change to prevent Apple Mail from deadlocking (in rare
circumstances) when training SpamSieve on Mac OS X 10.4.3.

The Apple Mail training commands now respect the preference for
whether to color messages.

Added hidden preference LogSpam that you can turn on with
defaultswritecom.c-command.SpamSieveLogSpamYES to make
SpamSieve keep a maildir-style folder of the spam messages it’s
seen. Right now, this is not recommended for general use on
slower machines.

Sped up filtering when Growl notifications are enabled. Improved
the text/layout of the Growl notifications.

Re-installing or updating Eudora could have the effect of
re-enabling Eudora’s built-in junk plug-ins. This could reduce the
filtering accuracy and cause unexpected behavior as multiple
plug-ins acted on the same messages. Now, if SpamSieve detects that
its Eudora plug-in is installed, it will automatically disable any
other Eudora junk plug-ins.

When you reset the corpus, SpamSieve automatically creates a dated
backup so that it’s possible to revert, if need be.

The pop-up menu for selecting the uncertainty threshold now supports
scores as high as 98. This makes it possible to designate all
non-blocklisted spam messages as uncertain.

The S and G indicators are now only shown in the Dock icon after
manual training, not auto-training.

The log is now UTF-8 rather than ASCII, so it should be much
more readable for people using localized versions of SpamSieve.

More errors are now logged.

Better at finding sound files that are built into Mailsmith.

Worked around Tiger bug that would cause archived log files to not
decompress automatically when opened.

Fixed regression where SpamSieve could crash if you tried to
install the Entourage scripts when Entourage was not installed.

Fixed bug in Apple Mail’s Train as Good, where it didn’t
always move messages out of the Spam mailbox if there were
lots of recipients.

Fixed Entourage Train Good script to not make a new
Uncertain Junk category when one already exists (but
Entourage says that it doesn’t).

Worked around AppleScript error that could occur when running
Entourage scripts.

The regex code is more bulletproof in the face of rare OS errors.

Added better heuristic for determining which files SpamSieve can
import addresses from. This should prevent some rare crashes.

Updated the Habeas link in the Preferences window.

The history database is more robust on Tiger.

The Purchase window now makes it more clear when the serial
number has been successfully entered. Merged the Web
Purchase… and Instant Purchase… buttons.

Adjusted the way the remaining demo time is displayed, as it led
many people to believe that they had less than a month of total
trial time.

Improved training tips and the manual.

Added French translation of manual. Updated Vietnamese
manual. Fixed regression where the Italian and Vietnamese
manuals were inaccessible.

2.3.1—May 16, 2005

Works with Apple Mail on Mac OS X 10.4.1. SpamSieve should
automatically install a new copy of its Apple Mail plug-in the
first time it’s launched, but if it doesn’t you can do so by
choosing Install Apple Mail Plug-In from the SpamSieve
menu.

Various accuracy improvements.

Renamed the Apple Mail training commands to Train as Good
and Train as Spam.

Train as Spam is much faster in Apple Mail on 10.4 when
there are multiple messages selected.

If SpamSieve’s Dock icon is hidden, a new SpamSieve - Open
Window command will appear in Apple Mail’s Message menu.
This lets you quit SpamSieve or access its windows and settings
while its menu bar is hidden.

Worked around Apple Mail bug so that Train as Good now moves
spam messages out of Mail’s Spam folder on 10.4, provided
that SpamSieve had put them there.

Reduced the maximum size of the Growl notification bubbles.

Better at parsing malformed messages.

The HTML parser is much faster with certain pathological spam
messages that could previously drag parsing out for a minute or
more.

Worked around Entourage bug that could lead to the creation of
multiple Uncertain Junk categories.

SpamSieve no longer complains about the permissions on Apple
Mail’s Bundles folder if you’re using a different mail
program.

Removed the Prune Corpus command. With auto-training being
much smarter than in earlier versions, it’s almost never
advisable to prune, and improper pruning severely reduces
accuracy.

The demo reminder window updates the number of days remaining if
you leave SpamSieve running for days or weeks at a time.

Fixed bug that could cause a crash when using Instant
Purchase.

Worked around crash caused by bug in 10.2.

Updated localizations.

2.3—April 25, 2005

General

Works with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

Made lots of improvements to SpamSieve’s parsers and
tokenizer for better accuracy. To fully take advantage of
this, you will need to reset SpamSieve’s corpus and re-train
it (e.g. with 300 recent good messages and 600 recent
spams). However, this is certainly not required, and I
expect that most people will opt for the simpler upgrade of
just installing the new SpamSieve application.

Auto-training works better. SpamSieve is smarter about
selecting which incoming messages to train itself with, so
that it reaches a high level of accuracy sooner, and it is
better at adapting to new types of mail that you receive.

Improved the training tips and the training section of
the manual so that it’s clearer what the best practices are.

When training the whitelist, SpamSieve will now create rules
that match the addresses of the other recipients. This
should reduce false positives from people who haven’t
previously sent you mail, but who correspond with the same
people you do.

Added selection AppleScript property, which can be used
to get the selected token infos in the corpus or the
selected rules in the whitelist or blocklist window. One use
of this is demonstrated in a script that adds the
addresses of the selected whitelist rules to the Address
Book.

Added AppleScript properties and commands to access
SpamSieve’s windows and log. One use of this is demonstrated
in a script that lets you open SpamSieve’s windows if
its Dock icon is hidden (and thus the menu bar is
inaccessible).

Notification

Added option to control whether Growl notifications contain
excerpts of the message body.

The new message count in SpamSieve’s Dock icon is now
auto-positioned.

Fixed regression where dragging the slider to adjust the
size of the number in the Dock icon didn’t temporarily show
the number so that you could preview the results.

Apple Mail Integration

Improved accuracy due to better decoding of Apple Mail
messages.

The commands for training SpamSieve from Apple Mail are now
in Mail’s Message menu, rather than in the Scripts
menu. This lets you access those commands in the same way on
10.2 through 10.4, and you don’t have to worry about
changing the scripts around if you boot into a different
version of the OS.

The Apple Mail plug-in is faster at processing messages.

If the Apple Mail plug-in is installed but disabled for some
reason (e.g. a location switch or OS re-install), SpamSieve
will automatically re-enable it (takes effect when you
relaunch Mail).

Worked around bug in Mail that could prevent Train Good or
Train Spam from working properly when training multiple
messages at once that were already in their final
destination.

Eudora Integration

The installer no longer asks you to find Eudora except when
absolutely necessary.

The Eudora plug-in is now installed in the ApplicationSupport folder rather than inside the Eudora application
package. Thus, it’s no longer necessary to re-install the
plug-in when updating Eudora, although you still may need to
disable the SpamWatch and SpamHeaders plug-ins if updating
Eudora re-enables them.

Added a Cancel button to the alert that you get if
Eudora is already running when you ask SpamSieve to install
the Eudora plug-in, in case you don’t want to quit Eudora at
that time.

Fixes and Tweaks

The Apple Help is now multiple linked pages, rather than a
single page, so you can now use Help Viewer’s search box.

Simplified the setup instructions in the manual, and added
new sections on customization.

Improved duplicate message detection.

Fixed bug where e-mail addresses were not always correctly
parsed out of mail headers.

Tweaked the format of Trained entries in the log.

Worked around OS bug that could cause SpamSieve to freeze
when installing AppleScripts.

SpamSieve is better at following aliases and more tolerant
of incorrect permissions when looking for its support files.

Updated to eSellerate Engine 3.6.1.

Improved serial number name entry.

Various localization fixes.

The ? buttons in the Preferences window now open the
specific help sections on Jaguar.

Fixed longstanding unreported bug where you could launch
multiple instances of SpamSieve if you were using Jaguar.

2.2.4—February 10, 2005

Increased the speed of SpamSieve’s message processing.

Processing messages with Entourage is much faster. To realize the
speed increase, re-install SpamSieve’s Entourage scripts and let it
replace the existing ones.

Improved accuracy through better HTML and header processing. (It
is not necessary to reset the corpus.)

Colors to indicate spamminess in Apple Mail are now enabled by
default.

Can now play sounds (and bounce the Dock icon) when mail arrives, even
if SpamSieve or a mail program is frontmost.

Added option to Entourage’s Change Settings to make all spam
messages marked with category Junk instead of marking some of
them with Uncertain Junk.

Added more standard blocklist rules for non-Latin character sets.

AppleScript errors complaining about not being able to find the
SpamSieve application should be much less common now. If you do see
such an error, asking SpamSieve to re-install the scripts for Apple
Mail or Entourage (and letting it replace the existing scripts)
should cure things.

The behavior of the default classifier (if no rules or other
classifiers match, and the Bayesian classifier is disabled) may now
be changed by setting the DefaultIsGood default. Normally this
is YES, but you can set it to NO to make SpamSieve treat all
non-whitelisted messages as spam.

Pruning now is recorded in the log.

Updated the Russian localization.

Added Swedish and Vietnamese localizations.

Expanded and improved the manual.

The Entourage scripts no longer mark messages with multiple copies
of the same category.

Fixed bug where SpamSieve would sometimes incorrectly think that
it had made a mistake (if auto-training was on and the user had
asked it to reclassify a message).

Fixed bug in the ChangeSettings scripts.

No longer reports an error when trying to reset an empty initial
corpus.

Fixed crash when quitting after resetting an empty corpus.

Fixed bug where SpamSieve would crash when reading a damaged corpus
file.

Worked around OS bug that could cause crashes when creating the
Uncertain Junk category in Entourage.

Notification dismissal now works on Tiger.

Apple Mail’s scripts are now installed in the correct location when
running on Tiger.

2.2.3—November 15, 2004

Fixed bug where SpamSieve would complain of a permissions error
at startup.

2.2.2—November 14, 2004

Can notify with Growl when good messages arrive, and to help
spot false positives without looking through the entire contents
of the spam folder.

Added Change Settings commands for Apple Mail and Entourage,
which let you configure script options (spam folder name,
behavior when using Train Good and Train Spam, etc.)
without having to edit the scripts. The settings are stored in
SpamSieve’s preferences file, so they will persist if you update
or re-install the scripts.

Fixed bug where SpamSieve would report a syntax error when
processing certain messages (typically in non-ASCII character
sets).

Better accuracy due to improved header and body analysis.

Better accuracy due to smarter auto-creation of From (name)
rules.

Auto-training now takes scores into account; the corpus is
updated using messages that were harder to classify, to
forestall errors.

Better handling of spam messages that lie about their encoding.

Entourage now uses two separate categories for spam messages, so
that you can see which ones are more (or less) spammy.

Improved accuracy when processing messages in German.

Any Address rules now match SendTo addresses.

Better handling of messages with “From ” lines.

Worked around Mail performance problem where Add Good would
hang if there were a lot of recipients.

The Dock (and DragThing) good message counter no longer
increases for messages received while the mail program is active.

Added Russian localization.

Improved the French localization.

Better recovery from damaged Rules and History.db files.

Added Italian-localized installation instructions.

Improved launch time.

Better parsing of PGP messages.

Worked around 10.2 bug that could cause crashes when the
Training Tip window was updated.

Fixed bad interaction between auto-training and duplicates when
the corpus was small.

More tolerant of incorrect file and folder permissions.

If Launch Services cannot find the Eudora application, the
installer will now try some heuristics and prompt the user to
locate Eudora, rather than giving up.

The Apple Mail and Eudora plug-ins are better at finding and
launching the SpamSieve application, and they will notify the
user if they are unable to do this.

Updated to eSellerate 3.5.9, which provides support for
registration names using non-ASCII characters.

When you type in your serial number, SpamSieve normalizes its
spacing and case.

The AddGood and AddSpam AppleScripts have been renamed
TrainGood and TrainSpam. When installing the new
scripts, SpamSieve will automatically move the old ones to the
trash.

The Entourage spam folder is now called Junk E-mail instead
of Spam, since Entourage 2004 already has a so-named folder.

2.2.1—September 20, 2004

Shows count of new good messages in DragThing 5.3 and later, if
you install an integration script. (This script will be built
into future versions of DragThing.)

Fixed accuracy regressions from 2.1.4 and made some accuracy
improvements.

Added Italian localization.

Auto-training will no longer add duplicate messages to the
corpus, because they interfere with undo.

You can now start a new paragraph in the crash reporter by
pressing Return rather than Command-Return.

Tries to add itself to the Launch Services database at launch,
to make it easier for the scripts and plug-ins to find the
SpamSieve application.

Fixed bug where the help buttons in the Preferences window
didn’t work unless the main help had previously been opened.

Improved the French and Japanese localizations.

The Edit Log command will now open the log using an editor,
rather than Console, if BBEdit is unavailable.

Improved accuracy statistics when using Apple Mail IMAP
accounts.

The mailbox parser is faster and more tolerant of malformed mbox
files.

No longer tries to roll over the log more than once per day.

Fixed regression where adding to the whitelist or blocklist
didn’t work if a disabled rule matched the message.

Fixed crash that could happen when showing progress bar at
launch.

Fixed crash when scanning System 7–format sounds.

Fixed bug where slightly spammy Apple Mail messages would be
colored and recorded as spam, but not moved to the Spam mailbox.

2.2—August 24, 2004

Accuracy Improvements

SpamSieve is smarter about what text to tokenize, it
extracts more information from messages, it’s better at
detecting invisible text, and it can undo more spammer
obfuscations.

The Bayesian classifier can leverage the results of
SpamAssassin’s heuristic tests. It also assigns better word
probabilities and is better at deciding which parts of the
message are important.

Messages containing Habeas headers are now checked against the
Habeas Whitelist. This protects against spam messages that
include Habeas headers in order to get through filters.

Removed the Import Seed Spam command, as it would
reduce accuracy with recent versions of SpamSieve.

General Improvements

Auto-training is more automatic. There is now a single checkbox
to enable auto-training and, if it’s on, SpamSieve will try to
do the right thing when it processes new messages. That is, it
will train itself using messages of the types that it needs to
see more of, and it will prevent the corpus from growing
unbalanced or overly large. Also, it will update the whitelist
using every incoming good message, so that you can have a
complete whitelist without bloating the corpus.

The rules and corpus windows now have toolbars, and they support
iTunes-style filter-searching.

The corpus and rules are now scriptable, and SpamSieve now
supports AppleScript Kit terminology.

Assorted performance enhancements make SpamSieve faster and
improve the responsiveness of its user interface.

Added Portuguese localization.

Blocklist and Whitelist

Rules support more match fields: From (name), Any
Recipient, Any Address, Any Character Set, and
Any Attachment Name.

The new Import Addresses… command lets you import
blocklist and whitelist rules from text files (e.g. address
book exports or mbox files).

Added default blocklist rules for .pif and .scr
attachments and a default whitelist rule for
lists.c-command.com.

Rules can now match the empty string, e.g. when there is a
subject header, but the subject is blank. They can also
match absent headers by matching against, e.g.
<SpamSieve-Unknown-Subject>.

The Text to Match field now abbreviates using an
ellipsis if the text won’t all fit.

Notification

Can make a Griffin PowerMate flash when new good messages
arrive.

Now supports System 7–format notification sounds as well as
Entourage sound sets. In addition to the
Library/Sounds folders, SpamSieve will now look for
sounds installed with Apple Mail, Entourage, Mailsmith, and
PowerMail.

Doesn’t play the notification sound if you are using fast
user switching and SpamSieve is running in one of the
background sessions.

Notifications that require dismissal (continuous bouncing,
PowerMate flashing) are no longer triggered when SpamSieve
or the mail program is already frontmost. Thus, you don’t
have to deactivate the mail program and then activate it
again to dismiss the notification.

Apple Mail Integration

Sets the colors of spam messages to reflect how spammy they
are, making it easier to skim the Spam mailbox for false
positives.

Protects against Web bugs by telling Mail not to load the
images from messages that are classified as spam.

The Add Good script is better at moving messages from
the Spam folder back to the correct inbox, and it will
mark them as unread when it does so.

The Add Good and Add Spam now work with Mac OS X 10.3.5.

The plug-in will look for SpamSieve in the Applications
folder, even if Launch Services is confused and says it
can’t find it.

Entourage Integration

The Exclude my addresses switch now also applies to the
Entourage address book, to reduce the chances of a forged
spam getting through.

Sanity-checks addresses that are loaded from Entourage.
For instance, if both the name and the address were entered
in Entourage’s address field, SpamSieve will now extract
just the address, rather than taking Entourage’s word for
it.

The Add Good script now works with the
Possible Spam folder and marks false positives as
unread.

Messages can have more than one category, so SpamSieve now
adds and removes the Junk category from the message,
rather than replacing the category. This means that
marking a message as junk doesn’t wipe out other categories
on the message.

Shows a progress bar while importing Entourage addresses.

Eudora Integration

Removed the option to use the full Eudora junk score range;
this setting is now always in effect.

The Statistics window shows the number of blocklist and
whitelist rules and the number of spam messages received per
day. The date sheet has a Now button that enters the
current date and time.

The log is now stored in ~/Library/Logs/SpamSieve. The
Open Log command now opens the log in Console, so that
it’s easier to monitor as it changes. To get the old
behavior of opening the log in a text editor, hold down
Option and choose Edit Log.

If the log file grows larger than 5 MB, SpamSieve compresses
it, archives it by date, and starts a new log.

When SpamSieve makes a mistake, the log records which
classifier made the error and what the message’s score was.
The log also now records parse errors and the number of
messages in the corpus.

Fixes and Tweaks

SpamSieve can optionally show an alternate, more
photo-realistic, icon in the Dock.

There is a new mailing list for discussion of SpamSieve.

Each tab of the Preferences window now contains a help
button that will open the corresponding section of the Apple
help.

Updated to PCRE 4.5 and SQLite 2.8.15.

Fixed bug where SpamSieve could crash when generating a
message’s identifier if a system routine failed.

Fixed bug in EDMessage that could cause crashes when
decoding certain quoted-printable messages.

Better handling of 8-bit subjects with no specified
encoding.

Worked around Panther bug that could cause crashes or
drawing artifacts on the desktop by no longer trying to draw
on the Dock icon when it’s hidden.

Worked around OS bug that prevented certain notification
sounds from playing.

Fixed bug where the selection was not always preserved when
editing blocklist and whitelist rules.

The Show Corpus, Show Statistics, and
Preferences… commands in the Dock menu now bring
SpamSieve to the front.

The progress window when exporting the corpus sometimes
lagged a bit before closing automatically.

Fixed bug where SpamSieve would get confused if you entered
the empty string as a date.

2.1.4—April 15, 2004

Fixed bug where SpamSieve could crash when installing the Eudora
plug-in if you were using Eudora 6.0.x.

Added menu commands for installing the Apple Mail plug-in and
scripts, the Eudora plug-in, and the Entourage scripts. These
items are now stored inside the SpamSieve application package.

Scripts for the other applications are now stored inside the
application bundle, not at the root of the disk image. The
Show Other Scripts menu command will reveal them in the
Finder.

Apple Mail and Eudora users should update their plug-ins, using
the commands in the SpamSieve menu.

Added the score script command, which returns an integer
between 0 and 100 indicating how spammy the message is. 50 and
higher mean spam.

The Predicted lines in SpamSieve’s log now show the scores
of the messages.

Can now use Eudora’s full 0-to-100 junk score range if you check
the appropriate box in the Advanced preferences.

Improved parsing of messages with 8-bit transfer data.

Faster at processing messages.

Added support for Outlook Express 5.

Worked around OS bug that could cause SpamSieve to come to the
front each time a message was processed in Apple Mail or Eudora
(usually if an X11 application was frontmost).

Fixed bug where errors encountered while processing messages
were not reported in the log.

Worked around Cocoa problem where certain notification sounds
wouldn’t play.

Made the Purchase window easier to understand, and added a
button for looking up lost serial numbers.

Trims the text in the serial number field so people don’t
accidentally paste the number in twice.

Software updater is better at checking whether the computer can
connect to the Internet.

SpamSieve now tries to parse Eudora messages according to
RFC822, even though this will sometimes fail, as many Eudora
messages are not RFC822-compliant.

Adjusted the list of headers that SpamSieve ignores.

Added keyboard shortcuts for Apple Mail scripts.

Improved the training tips.

Updated to SQLite 2.8.13.

Updated to eSellerate SDK 3.5.5.

The Send Report button in the crash reporter is no longer a
default button, so there’s no longer confusion about entering
returns in the comment field.

No longer prints fragments of spam messages to the console when
it gets confused.

Replaced the copy of the manual outside the app with a read-me.

2.1.2—January 26, 2004

SpamSieve can now move Apple Mail POP messages to the Spam
folder. Thus, it now fully supports Apple Mail on Jaguar and
Panther.

Honor Habeas headers is now off by default.

Fixed regression where blocklist and whitelist rules got
deselected after editing their text.

When loading addresses from Entourage, SpamSieve now picks up
addresses that are not associated with any contact (that is,
they appear only in a group).

The default date shown in the Statistics window is now the
date that SpamSieve was first launched, rather than September
2002.

The Apple Mail AddGood script is better at finding the
proper inbox when moving false positives out of the Spam
folder.

The Apple Mail MarkIfSpam script can mark the spam
messages as read.

The Purchase window now makes it more clear when a serial
number has been accepted.

In the Statistics window, Set… is now Set Date… and
Copy is now Copy Stats.

Fixed crash that could happen when processing messages in
Japanese encodings.

Added Japanese localization.

2.1.1—January 8, 2004

Much faster at processing messages when there are many blocklist
and whitelist rules. Also improved the speed of loading,
deleting, and sorting rules.

Improved accuracy tracking with the Panther version of Apple
Mail; previously, SpamSieve couldn’t always tell when it was
being corrected.

Catches more spam because it knows about more spammer
obfuscation tricks and also which headers it should ignore.

Fixed bug (introduced in 2.0) where the Bayesian engine didn’t
work if Mac OS X’s default language was set to Japanese.

The SpamSieve Eudora Plug-In is better at launching the
SpamSieve application if it is not already running.

Loading Entourage addresses now adds to the addresses that were
previously loaded, rather than replacing them. This makes it
possible for Entourage users who have more than one Entourage
identity to give SpamSieve the addresses from all their address
books (by loading once for each identity). Hold down Option when
clicking Load to get the old behavior of replacing the
previously loaded addresses.

The sound pop-up menu in the Preferences window now
immediately notices when new sounds are installed; previously,
it would only check when updating the rest of the preferences
window.

You can now add a rule without a the Blocklist or
Whitelist window being frontmost. SpamSieve will ask which
type of rule to add.

Regex rules can now start with an options modifier such as
(?-i).

Copying rules to the clipboard now just copies the text to match
(typically an e-mail address), not all the columns. To get all
the columns, you can print to PDF.

The Entourage AddGood script now finds localized inboxes,
rather than creating a folder called Inbox.

The Entourage AddSpam script can now remove spam messages
from the server.

The Statistics window now shows percentages instead of
ratios.

SpamSieve will now quit at launch if another copy of the
application is already running.

Re-targeted broken Habeas URL.

Added the following menu commands: Close All Windows,
Minimize All Windows, and Zoom.

2.1—December 9, 2003

Added support for Apple Mail POP accounts. POP messages can be
marked as junk and colored, but (due to limitations in the
present version of Apple Mail) they cannot be moved to another
mailbox.

Added a Training Tip window that gives advice on how to
improve SpamSieve’s accuracy, based on the current state of the
corpus and preferences.

Rules in the whitelist and blocklist are no longer limited to
just matching sender addresses. They can now match a variety of
message fields (To, CC, Subject, etc.), as well as the message
body. In addition to exact matches, rules now support the
following match styles: contains, starts with, ends with (useful
for matching domains), and Perl-compatible regular expressions.
You can now edit rules and add new rules manually (as opposed to
automatically, as a result of training SpamSieve with a
message).

When trained with a good message from a mailing list, SpamSieve
will automatically create a whitelist rule based on a mailing
list header, if present.

SpamSieve can now read in the Entourage address book and use it
as a whitelist. Thus, the Entourage rule can now give SpamSieve
all the messages, not just the ones that were from unknown
senders. This means that SpamSieve can now accurately notify the
user when non-spam messages are received. Also, the statistics
it keeps will be more complete.

Improved the accuracy of the Bayesian classifier when the corpus
is unbalanced.

Made a variety of low-level changes to improve SpamSieve’s
accuracy, for instance: adjusted the list of headers that are
analyzed and how words are tokenized.

The Apple Mail AddSpam script now has an option to control
whether the messages are moved to the Spam folder.

The Entourage AddGood script now moves messages to the
inbox if they’re located in the Spam folder.

Mailsmith users can now auto-train using only spam or good
messages by turning off training in Mailsmith and turning on one
of the auto-train checkboxes in SpamSieve.

Improved the importing of mbox files that do not have blank
lines between the messages, such as some Eudora mailboxes. Fixed
a bug where the the mbox parser could crash if a message had
length zero. Also, SpamSieve now shows a progress bar while
counting the number of messages that will be imported.

Improved the corpus and rule list displays. You can now enter
and leave editing mode by typing Return. Type-ahead works better;
for instance, if you type “g” and there are no rows that start
with “g,” it will look for one that starts with “f.” When you
delete a word or rule, you can cancel out of the confirmation
sheet by typing Escape. To avoid the confirmation sheet
entirely, you can delete using Command-Delete instead of Delete.
When a word or rule is deleted, SpamSieve selects a nearby rule
so that you don’t lose your place. When deleting many words at
once, SpamSieve no longer shows a progress window for deletions
that will not take very long.

Entering the name and serial number to personalize SpamSieve is
now more foolproof: SpamSieve strips leading and trailing
whitespace, and it detects when you enter a coupon code in the
serial number field. Fixed regression where SpamSieve rejected
names containing non-ASCII characters. In addition, there’s a
new button for quickly redeeming coupons.

Updated to the latest eSellerate SDK so that purchasing
SpamSieve from within the application is faster.

SpamSieve now requires Mac OS X 10.2.6 or later.

Fixed bug where dates entered in the Statistics window were
sometimes parsed in GMT instead of the local time zone, thus
causing the date to be off by a few hours.

The message count in the Dock icon now resets when an e-mail
client becomes active (rather than just when SpamSieve became
active). You can also control the size and position of the
number in the Dock icon.

Much faster at deleting lots of rules at once.

Replaced the message store database with custom code that’s
faster and more reliable.

Improved accuracy for HTML messages containing links.

Importing mbox files is faster.

Fixed bug where you couldn’t use Web registration after the demo
period had expired.

The log records which addresses matched the whitelist or
blocklist.

The log records corpus imports.

Auto-training is faster.

The Entourage Add Spam script can close the frontmost window if
it’s spam.

Fixed bug where the date in the Statistics window could get
cut off if you changed it to use a more verbose format.

Worked around OS bug that caused dates like “01.09.2003” to be
interpreted as January 9 in German-style locales.

Added Copy button to the Statistics window.

Fixed problem updating certain history databases from 1.3.1.

More resilient to minor corpus file corruption.

Fixed crash that could happen with improperly formed multi-part
messages.

Shows the number of blocklist or whitelist rules in the title
bar.

The whitelist now contains some c-command.com addresses by
default.

Fixed crash when opening the Statistics window while adding
messages.

The Statistics window shows ratios, where applicable.

Assorted minor performance improvements.

The modification dates of the AppleScripts are now the actual
modification dates, not the date the distribution was built.

2.0.1—September 17, 2003

Replaced the database engine that was being used to store the
corpus with some custom code. This should be much faster and
more reliable.

Loading and saving the rules is faster, due to a better file
format.

The rules and corpus message counts are now saved to disk during
idle time rather than when quitting. This should prevent data
loss in the event that SpamSieve doesn’t quit normally.

The whitelist and blocklist are more memory-efficient.

Plugged memory leak in EDMessage.

Fixed crash involving certain really long header lines.

Fixed bug where the Whitelist and Blocklist windows
weren’t always up to date.

Table views are smarter about not scrolling unnecessarily to
maintain their selections.

SpamSieve now extracts a lot more information from each
message. This makes it much more accurate and also makes it
learn faster.

Now integrates with Eudora 6 (Sponsored or Paid) via a plug-in.
It can now process every incoming Eudora message and can be
trained using the Junk and Not Junk commands in Eudora’s
Message menu.

SpamSieve now has a blocklist and a whitelist. These are
automatically maintained based on the senders of messages that
SpamSieve is trained with. The blocklist makes sure that all
messages from known spammers are caught and speeds processing
for these messages. The whitelist lets you be sure that certain
messages will never be marked as spam; this was possible before,
but now you don’t have to clutter your address book with
addresses from online retailers, etc.

You can now control how conservative or aggressive SpamSieve is
at catching spam.

SpamSieve can now play a sound or bounce its Dock icon after a
batch of non-spam messages has arrived. This is meant to replace
your e-mail client’s new mail notification, which you don’t want
going off if all the new messages are spam.

Shows the number of new good messages in the Dock icon.

Now parses HTML so that it can better extract relevant
information from HTML messages, and also handle various
HTML-based tricks that spammers use to fool filters.

New method of calculating word probabilities makes SpamSieve
better at discerning which words in the message are important.

Includes a corpus of seed spam, to jump-start spam recognition
for users who do not have many saved spam messages.

The corpus is now stored in databases rather than in a property
list. This makes it launch faster and use much less memory, as
the corpus doesn’t have to be all in RAM at the same time.

The statistics file format (for History.db) has changed in order
to enable performance improvements and more statistical displays
in future versions.

Handles more types of plain text obfuscations, and is much
faster at undoing them.

Added option for the address book whitelist to only use other
people’s addresses, so that spam messages from your own address
don’t match the whitelist.

Can mark all messages with Habeas headers as good.

Can mark all messages with some variant of “ADV” at the start of
the subject as spam.

Can mark all base64-encoded HTML messages as spam.

New probability combiner increases accuracy.

Uses stop words to speed processing and reduce false negatives.

When filtering a message, considers the number of occurrences of
the words, not just which words are present.

Can import messages from mbox files.

Can import the corpus from and export it to an XML property list
(the same format used by 1.x).

SpamSieve can now check for updated versions of itself.

Added crash reporter.

Added Dock menu containing frequently used commands.

The entries in the log are more detailed.

The corpus now stores the date at which each word was last
accessed.

Fixed bug where storing statistics would fail on systems that
didn’t know about GMT.

Fixed bug where SpamSieve could throw away long runs of HTML
thinking they were attachments.

Added button for opening the Mac OS X Address Book from inside
SpamSieve.

The Statistics window now has a contextual menu item for
copying the displayed information.

SpamSieve no longer wastes cycles updating the Statistics
window after it’s been closed.

The Statistics window is smarter about updating only the
portions that could have changed.

No longer shows Good Words and Spam Words stats.

Logging has less overhead.

Updates the history asynchronously, resulting in faster message
processing.

Checks for mistakes in a background thread.

False negatives are now written to disk in a background thread.

Re-arranged the Corpus window.

Pruning the corpus now works by access date rather than by word
counts. Of course, you can manually prune the old way by sorting
the Corpus window by Total.

Updated to SQLite 2.8.6 and tuned it for speed.

Updated to PCRE 4.3.

Updated to eSellerate 3.5, which should fix crashes some people
saw after registering on 10.2.6.

Now looks at headers of subparts of messages from Mailsmith.

Time-consuming operations now either have a progress bar or a
progress spinner.

Better at extracting malformed e-mail addresses from headers.

Copying rows from the Corpus window to the clipboard now
uses the order of the columns in the window rather than the
default column order.

Fixed regression where the Entourage scripts no longer created
the Spam folder if it didn’t exist.

Fixed potential crash with regex replacements at the end of a
string.

The history and the corpus files can now be aliases.

Automatically trims carriage returns and other illegal
characters when you paste in your name and serial number.

Now saves the name and serial number to disk as soon as they’re
entered.

The Spam folder in Entourage no longer has to be top-level.

Entourage can mark good messages as unread.

Type-selecting in table views is quicker.

No longer nags constantly when unregistered.

Fixed bug where it could look as though SpamSieve had hung if
it started up in the background with an empty corpus.

1.3.1—June 18, 2003

Added direct integration with Mailsmith 2.0 and later. Enabling
SpamSieve is as easy as clicking a checkbox. You can train
SpamSieve directly from Mailsmith’s Message menu. Bare Bones
Software has seamlessly integrated it with Mailsmith’s powerful
filtering system, and Mailsmith knows not to bounce its Dock
icon after receiving a batch of messages that are all spam.

Fixed crashing bug triggered by incorrectly encoded headers.

Regex substitutions are faster and much more memory efficient.

When adding spam messages to the corpus, the default is now for
SpamSieve to move them to the Spam folder.

The PowerMail Move If Spam script now changes the color of
spam messages.

The Emailer scripts now pass text and HTML attachments on to
SpamSieve for analysis.

Added instructions for using the Entourage and PowerMail address
books as whitelists.

Added experimental support for moving Entourage messages on IMAP
accounts to the (local) Spam folder. This can be enabled by
editing the scripts with Script Editor.

For clarity, the names of AppleScripts that ask SpamSieve to
predict the category of a message now contain the word “if.”

Added lots of minor clarifications to the documentation.

1.3—February 11, 2003

More resilient to spammers’ tricks for obfuscating words.

Can use e-mail addresses in the system Address Book as a
whitelist. Messages sent from those addresses will never be
marked as spam.

Greatly reduced overall memory usage as well as launch and quit
times.

Can save false negatives to disk for later reporting to
SpamSieve’s developer.

You can edit the spam and good counts associated with a word,
remove selected words from the corpus, and reset the corpus
entirely.

Type-ahead navigation in the Corpus window. Type the first
few letters of a word or number to select it (and scroll to it).

You can hide statistics from before a set date, to better see
the current accuracy and spam reception rate.

Improvements to the Corpus window: Shows all words rather
than only those considered statistically significant. Re-sorting
by numeric columns is twice as fast. You can copy the selected
rows to the clipboard or drag them to another application. The
selection is preserved when you change the sort column, you can
sort in descending order, and the sorted column is remembered
between launches. The Home and End keys work.

The Prune Corpus command now tells you how many words it
would remove and asks for confirmation.

The statistics tracking is smarter about handling duplicate
messages.

The statistics have tooltips explaining what they mean, and you
can copy all of the statistics to the clipboard at once.

Improved accuracy tracking of PowerMail and Emailer messages.

Eudora Integration: Can mark spam messages as read and/or mark
them for removal from the server.

Expanded the AppleScript dictionary, to enable better
integration with mail and news clients.

Entourage Integration: Creates Junk category if there isn’t one,
and can mark spam messages as read.

Mailsmith Integration: The adding scripts now set the
appropriate message properties.

Better parsing of messages with illegal characters in the
headers.

SpamSieve’s Info.plist file contains an LSUIElement entry.
Change the 0 to a 1 to hide the application’s Dock icon.
(You’ll need to change it back to access the preferences.)

The message count display has moved from the Corpus window
to the Statistics window.

Better error message when the corpus couldn’t be saved.

Added tooltips to preferences.

The registration window gives better feedback when you
personalize.

Better recovery from errors in the corpus file.

The secondary parser is better at handling DOS linebreaks.

1.2.2—November 20, 2002

Fixed bug in the PowerMail Add Good script.

Added uninstaller for Eudora users.

Better handling of errors while adding messages to the corpus.

Removed bloat from the Entourage Mark Spam script.

The application icon now has an alpha channel, so it doesn’t
appear with a white halo when viewed on a colored background.

Minor changes to the manual.

1.2.1—November 18, 2002

Modified Info.plist to work around a bug in Mac OS X 10.1 that
could cause the Finder to crash when launching SpamSieve.

Adds special tokens for MIME entities such as part boundaries
and uninterpretable message parts.

Keeps track of the messages added to the corpus, and can
optionally prevent you from adding the same message more than
once (biasing the counts). Thus, you no longer have to remember
which messages you’ve already added.

You can now “undo” adds to the corpus, e.g. if you added a
message as good when you meant to add it as spam.

Can now add messages to the corpus as they are filtered, so
after the initial training you only have to add messages when
SpamSieve makes a mistake.

When filtering a message, SpamSieve can optionally check whether
the message is in the corpus. If it is, SpamSieve looks up the
answer rather than trying to predict. One use of this feature is
that if SpamSieve makes a mistake, you can Add Spam and then
Label/Move If Spam and be sure that the message will be
labeled/moved.

Keeps a log of additions to the corpus, filtering results, and
errors.

Mailsmith: If SpamSieve thinks a message is spam, it sets the
deleted property of the message to true; otherwise it sets
the flagged property of the message to true. Therefore, if
SpamSieve has classified the message then exactly one of the
properties will be true, and if it hasn’t they’ll both be false.
(Normally, neither of these message properties is used by
Mailsmith itself.)

Entourage and PowerMail: If you tell SpamSieve to move spam
messages to a spam folder and the spam folder doesn’t exist, the
script will create the spam folder for you.

When you add spam messages to the corpus, can optionally move
them to a Spam folder.

Added status indicators in the Dock icon (like Norton
DiskLight).

The spam probability of unknown words is now 0.4 instead of 0.2.

The Corpus window uses less memory and sorts much faster.

Accuracy tracking is faster and uses less memory and disk space.

Fixed bug where accuracy tracking didn’t work for some Mailsmith
messages with multiple parts.

Improved the manual’s instructions for e-mail client
integration.

Compiled with GCC 3 for greater speed.

Uses the latest version of the eSellerate SDK, which eliminates
a crash at startup under certain circumstances.

No longer shows the “Upgrading From 1.0” message when starting
with a blank corpus.

1.1—September 19, 2002

E-Mail Client Integration

Added support for PowerMail.

Added instructions and an AppleScript for making Mailsmith
download and filter mail faster.

Added an AppleScript for Entourage that moves spam into a
Junk folder.

Performance

Launches about 60% faster than 1.0.

You can now prune the corpus to remove words that are taking
up memory without contributing to spam recognition. This can
also dramatically decrease SpamSieve’s launch time.

Recalculating spam probabilities is about 10% faster and
uses less memory.

Quitting is faster because SpamSieve now writes corpus
changes to disk during idle time.

Saving the corpus is slightly faster.

Displays statistics about the number of messages filtered,
SpamSieve’s accuracy, and the types of words in the corpus.

SpamAssassin’s X-Spam-Status headers are now treated as single
words. This means that if SpamAssassin is running on your mail
server, SpamSieve will learn to respect (or ignore) its
judgment.

Installs the eSellerate Engine if it’s not present, thus
enabling “Instant Registration” for more users.

Asking SpamSieve to categorize a message now forces an update of
all the word probabilities. Previously, the update only happened
during idle time.

Highlights the sorted column in the Corpus window. The
columns themselves have shorter names. There’s a new “Total”
column. Auto-resizing of the columns works better. You can now
manually resize any column, and manual resizings and reorderings
are saved between launches.

Shows fatal errors as alert panels rather than just printing
them on the console.

The Corpus.plist data file is now sorted by word. This makes it
easier to examine the corpus manually, and to compare it to
other users’ corpora.